Note 13 — CHAPTER NINETEEN AKAZA KEEPS HIS VOW AND IS FINALLY FREE
Reading edition
In the year 1866, a miner found Akaza’s skull, while sinking a shaft in a strata of gravel one hundred and thirty-seven feet below the surface. It was in a beautiful flat, about fifteen miles north of Table Mountain, a mass of basaltic lava, six hundred feet thick, which was not erupted until after Akaza’s death.
The skull no longer surmounted that last nudity of man which instinct bids us conceal in the Earth. It was coated with a deposit of gravel and sand, that told of its lying in a river bed while mountains were worn to plains, and the decomposed quartz and loose gravel were plowed up by glacial erosion, and scattered over the hillsides. The skull was broken in its strongest part, an evidence of the force with which some torrent had dashed it against bowlders in the lapsing centuries.
Some time during its wanderings in the river beds, or while resting on the banks, a snail had crawled under the malar bone and died. Its shell was found there, and no such species of snail has been known since the volcanoes ceased pouring lava over California.
The skull[33] and the snail-shell have been the cause of great discussion among the scientists of our epoch: Its age is too great to agree with the preconceived idea of man’s existence.