When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

In making war with nature, there was risk of loss in winning.

The summit of Mount Everest is marine limestone.

Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life

I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes.

Nonfiction-wha t the hell, that just says, this is nongrapefruit we're having this morning.

The enthusiasm geologists show for adding new words to their conversation is, if anything, exceeded by their affection for the old. They are not about to drop 'granite.' They say 'granodiorite' when they are in church and 'granite' the rest of the week.