Labyrinthine ways through the Lava ash formations, Red Mountain Crater, Arizona, No. 6 from the series "Notes of Travel"
Underwood & Underwood (American, active 1881–1920)
1903
- Medium
- Albumen print, stereo
- Classification
- Photograph
- Dimensions
- Each image: 7.7 × 8.1 cm (3 1/16 × 3 1/4 in.); Card: 8.9 × 17.8 cm (3 9/16 × 7 1/16 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Photography and Media
- Credit line
- Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. Leigh B. Block
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Kids profiles and older: it shows nature, places, still life or a children's book. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Verso inscription:
You are part way up one of the ancient volcanoes in northwestern Arizona. The Grand Cayon is about forty miles behind you. Today this mountain is simply a picturesque height standing up from a great plain covered with sage-brush and straggling pines and cedars; in some earlier geologie age it was an active volcano or vent-hole through which poured out smoke and steam and fiery liquid rock heaved up from the tumultuous depths below. These weird masses of grayish red, crumbly mineral stuff are lava ashes, left here by prehistoric fires when the earth's vast caldron boiled over and the rim of the crater, thick with its choking lining of burn-out rocks, was left to cool at leisure through all the following long, slow centuries.
You can explore all sorts of queer corridors and uncanny looking aisles among these ragged walls; sometimes they are so narrow two people could not pass each other, and the grotesque shapes of the old lava-masses seem ready to fall upon you. There is a strange fascination about the spot, but it is the fascination belonging to the scene of an ancient and terrible drama, in the world's unwritten history.
One especially queer thing about…
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
