I have often thought of those canvases-with their Durham boats on the water and cows in the meadows and chuffing locomotives on the Pennsylvania sidein the light of Anita’s comment that you would understand a great deal of the history of the eastern continent if you understood all that had made possible one such picture. She was suggesting, it seemed to me, a sense of total composition-not merely one surface composition visible to the eye but a whole series of preceding compositions which in the later one fragmentarily endure and are incorporated into its substance-with materials of vastly differing age drawn together in a single scene, a composite canvas not only from the Hudson River School but including everything else that had been a part of the zones of time represented by the boats, gravels, steeples, cows, trains, talus, cutbanks, and kames, below a mountain broken open by a river half its age. The mountain touched the Martinsburg, and its rock was the younger by at least ten million years. Kittatinny Mountain is largely quartzite, the primary component of the hubs of Hell. In the posttectonic, profoundly eroded East, quartzite has tended to stand up high. The Martinsburg is soft, and is therefore valley. There is nothing but time between the two. Where the formations meet, a touch of a finger will cover both the beginning and the end of the ten million years, which are dated at about 440 and 430 million years before the present-from flexplek huren amsterdam latest Ordovician time to a point in the early Silurian. During that time, something apparently lifted the Martinsburg out of its depositional pit and held it above sea level until weathers wore it low enough to be ready to accept whatever might spread over it from higher ground. The quartzite-as sandspread over it, coming down from Taconic mountains. The sand became sandstone. Upward of fifty million years later, the sand grains fused and turned into quartzite in the heat and the crush of new rising mountains, or possibly a hundred million years after that, in the heat and the crush of more mountains. The Delaware River at that time was not even a cloud in the sky. Rivers of greater size were flowing the other way, crossing at wild angles the present route of the Delaware. Rivers go flexplek huren eindhoven wherever the country tells tl1em to, if the country is in vertical motion. The country would not be right for the Delaware for roughly a hundred million more years, and still another hundred million years would go by before the river achieved its present relationship with Kittatinny Mountain. No one knows how the river cut through.