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  3. (1)It snowed furiously the night before I stepped over the South Rim of the

(1)It snowed furiously the night before I stepped over the South Rim of the

游客2024-11-09  0
问题     (1)It snowed furiously the night before I stepped over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. It was mid-May, so the snow was wet and not dry enough to stick. But the moisture stained the soft soil at the trailhead a dove gray and spiced the air with the scent of ponderosa pine. The trail I was following, me New Hance, didn’t dawdle but marched directly to the canyon’s edge, took a sharp turn, men plunged straight downhill, a no-nonsense approach to reaching its destination: the bottom of the canyon and the banks of die Colorado River nearly a vertical mile below.
    (2)Someone in a hurry had made this trail, I thought, as I braced each jarring step with my trekking poles; someone eager to get past me red-orange terraces rising in tiers above the river, to get down to me sandy beaches at me water’s edge. Someone eager to reach home.
    (3)Home. It may seem implausible to the more man four million of us who come each year to marvel at the Grand Canyon, but this magnificent and seemingly uninhabitable geology, exalted since 1919 as a national park, was indeed once a home. For at least 10,000 years people lived, loved, traded, even farmed in the canyon’s depths. They marked it with names, wove its temple-like peaks and bluffs into their lore, and breathed their spirits into every spring, every marbled cliff and large rocks. And then, a mere century ago, newcomers to me canyon, overcome by its beauty, decided that no human habitation was ever again to mar the canyon park. Landforms mat carried a name, a spirit of me past, were named anew.
    (4)"That New Hance Trail—virtually all me trails in me Grand Canyon—were made by our ancestors, the Hisatsinom," a Hopi named Leigh Kuwanwisiwma told me as we sat at the South Rim before my descent. "Archaeologists call our ancestors the Anasazi, but mat’s a Navajo term that means ’old enemy.’" As approaching 100°F, the little streamlet we’d been following shrank to a trickle and men dwindled into separate pools, where tadpoles swam uncertainly in circles. And mere ahead of us, drawing us on, rushed me Colorado—a heaving tongue of jade green that lashed at the hard shale on the far shore and lapped more gently against our sandy beach. To me Hopi this canyon was their ancestral home; to the Southern Paiute it was me holy land; to me Western Apache it was simply the edge of me big cliff. And for me…I only knew mat I now stood in a place of nearly two-billion-year-old rocks. Such numbers are as humbling as me number of stars in me sky—and as hard to comprehend. But that I could reach down and touch a part of Earth that existed when life itself was a mere billion-plus years old made this big cliff land seem very holy indeed.
    (5)Above us castle-like bluffs and terraces of rainbow-hued soils rose to me sky like a geological cathedral. We were dwarfs on a desert beach—but dwarfs with a princely flood of water at our feet. So we flung off our packs, dropped our trekking poles, and, surely like those first people to reach the river’s edge, plunged into me cool waters that had carved tins canyon, me grandest canyon on Earth.
    (6)Native people are, in fact, still farming in the Grand Canyon, if not in me park itself. In Havasu Canyon, a narrow side spur, the Havasupai, or Havasu ’Baaja— "people of me blue-green water"—end fields where they’ve lived for at least 700 years. About 450 of the tribe’s 650 members live here in the village of Supai. There are no roads or cars, so almost everyone takes the eight-mile trail in by foot, horse, or mule.
    (7)The trail switch backed down the rim in long, steep turns, then merged gently into Havasu Canyon. Watahomigie, a slim-faced local fellow, pulled up his horse and pointed far up the canyon, among the pihon pines. "See that bunch of wild horses? I’m planning to catch that palomino." The horses stood in a small knot near canyon walls of beige and gold, and suddenly I wanted nothing more than to see Watahomigie catch that palomino. His desire, the wild horses, the freedom to round them up, to gallop where one’s heart called seemed as rare a thing as this canyon home.
    (8)Once, until the early 1900s, the Havasupai had also lived in the main Grand Canyon, farming an oasis on Bright Angel Trail now called generically Indian Garden. Then they were evicted; their wickiups, gardens, and peach orchards destroyed. All they had left were the 518 acres of Havasu Canyon with its greenish-blue streams and waterfalls.
    (9)So when someone like me, a paleface like those who did the evicting, rides into dusty, people tend to look away or right through you. You are as invisible as they believe your ancestors hoped they would become.
    (10)Most of the tribe’s farmland is rich bottomland that borders Havasu Creek and is fenced to keep out tourists and horses. Behind the fences are the houses and peach orchards, the freshly plowed fields ready for planting, and other fields where the corn was up a good ten inches. Every house had a corral full of horses.
    (11)"Oh, yes, we’re a horsey people," vice president of the Havasupai tribal council Uqualla said, when I commented on their numbers. Just then her son came trotting by on a white horse, Spirit, her two-year-old grandson balanced in front. "That horse just loves my grandson," she laughed. The honeyed fragrance of cottonwood blossoms hung in the air, and Uqualla inhaled deeply. She’d returned that day from a trip.
    (12)"My heart just cries for this place when I’m gone," she said, surveying the soaring red walls that held the village and its green gardens in a close embrace. "I came around that last bend this morning and all the good scents hit me. I knew then that I was home."
    (13)Home. The Anasazi must have felt this too, when climbing down their trails to the bottom of the canyon. There were their farms, their homes, the people and places that held their hearts. It was good to know some of them felt it still—this grand feeling of being at home in the Grand Canyon. [br] The saying "We were dwarfs on a desert beach" in Para. 5 highlights that _____.
选项 A、the bluffs and terraces are very lofty
B、the locals living in Grand Canyon are very tall
C、these people are physically small
D、the beach is boundless
答案 A
解析 第5段第1句说，在我们头顶的(Above us)是绝壁和高耸人云的阶地(rose to the sky)，可知，正是它们的高反衬出我们的矮(在戈壁滩上我们简直就是个侏儒)，因此A正确。
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