The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Riddle Of The Rocks, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: The Riddle Of The Rocks
1895

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Illustrator: A. B. Frost

Release Date: November 26, 2007 [EBook #23629]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS ***

Produced by David Widger

THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1895

Upon the steep slope of a certain "bald" among the Great Smoky Mountains
there lie, just at the verge of the strange stunted woods from which the
treeless dome emerges to touch the clouds, two great tilted blocks of
sandstone. They are of marked regularity of shape, as square as if hewn
with a chisel. Both are splintered and fissured; one is broken in twain.
No other rock is near. The earth in which they are embedded is the rich
black soil not unfrequently found upon the summits. Nevertheless
no great significance might seem to attach to their isolation--an
outcropping of ledges, perhaps; a fracture of the freeze; a trace of
ancient denudation by the waters of the spring in the gap, flowing now
down the trough of the gorge in a silvery braid of currents, and with a
murmur that is earnest of a song.

It may have been some distortion of the story heard only from the
lips of the circuit rider, some fantasy of tradition invested with the
urgency of fact, but Roger Purdee could not remember the time when he
did not believe that these were the stone tables of the Law that Moses
flung down from the mountain-top in his wrath. In the dense ignorance of
the mountaineer, and his secluded life, he knew of no foreign countries,
no land holier than the land of his home. There was no incongruity to
his mind that it should have been in the solemn silence and austere
solitude of the "bald," in the magnificent ascendency of the Great
Smoky, that the law-giver had met the Lord and spoken with Him. Often
as he lay at length on the strange barren place, veiled with the clouds
that frequented it, a sudden sunburst in their midst would suggest anew
what supernal spl