VOA慢速英语：神秘美国大峡谷


[rm=300,2]http://i6.sina.com.cn/edu/specialenglish/exploration/voa27.mp3[/rm]

　In late September, Fifteen-Forty, a group of Spanish explorers led by Captain Garcia Lopez de Cardenas came to a stop. For weeks they had walked north across the great southwestern American desert. The land was dry. The sun was hot. They were searching for seven golden cities that they had been told about. There was not much to see on this land, just the far-away line where the sky meets the ground.
　　Suddenly, they came to the edge of what seemed to be a huge cut in the Earth. There seemed to be no way to walk around this deep canyon. It stretched below them into the distance, to their left and right, as far as they could see. Below them and across from where they stood were strange shapes of yellow, red, brown and black rocks and stone.

　　A small, muddy river appeared to be flowing at the bottom. Captain Cardenas ordered three of his soldiers to climb down the side of the canyon to see if they could find a way to cross to the other side. The three climbed about one-third of the way down. They found that the canyon was much deeper than they thought, so they climbed back up.
　　Captain Cardenas and his group turned back to the south. Today, history recognizes them as the first Europeans to see the Grand Canyon, formed by the Colorado River. They had reached a place that today is considered one of the most beautiful, strange, and interesting places in the world.

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　　European explorers did not return to the Grand Canyon for more than two centuries. Instead, native peoples continued to live there, as they had for hundreds, some of them for thousands of years.
　　In Seventeen-Seventy-Six, two Spanish clergymen were seeking a way to travel from Santa Fe, in what is now New Mexico, to Monterey, California on the west coast of North America. Father Francisco Escalante and another clergyman were unsuccessful in their search. However, they re-discovered the Grand Canyon.

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　　During the Nineteenth Century, the population of the United States was expanding rapidly to the west. The Grand Canyon was considered a barrier to travelers. Only two places had been found where the river is low enough to cross.
　　As settlers moved west, the United States government wanted more information about western territories. Much of the Grand Canyon was unknown. The words “Unknown Territory” were written on maps that showed the area.

　　In May, Eighteen-Sixty-Nine, Major John Wesley Powell and nine others began the first full exploration of the Colorado River. They put four wooden boats into the water at Green River Station in Wyoming. They began their trip to where the Green River joined the Colorado River. Major Powell wrote in his book that they were beginning “the trip down the Great Unknown”.
　　Major Powell had served in the Union army during the American Civil War. He lost his right arm in a battle during the war. After the war he became a professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan University. He also studied paleontology, the science of life existing in different periods of Earth’s history. And he became expert in ethnology, the study of different cultures. He was the right person to explore the Grand Canyon. He was someone who could describe the geology of the area, as well as learn about the American Indians who had begun living in the canyon as many as nine-thousand years ago. Several of those tribes still consider the Grand Canyon their home.

　The geology of the Grand Canyon is like a history of the formation of the Earth. During millions of years, water, ice, and wind formed the canyon. Although the Grand Canyon is in the middle of a desert, water plays an important part in the way the land looks. The sun shines bright and hot almost every day. It makes the soil hard. When rain does come, it cannot sink into the soil. Instead it flows to the Colorado River.

　Often, heavy rains cause violent floods along small rivers and streams that flow into the Colorado. These floods move huge amounts of soil and sometimes stones as big as houses. All of this material falls into the river and then is pushed along by the rapidly flowing river. This way the river slowly digs itself deeper into the rock surface of the Earth. The Colorado has been doing this for millions of years. You can see in the sides of the Grand Canyon different kinds of rock at different levels. Each of the eighteen levels was formed during a different period of Earth’s history.

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　　The ancestor of the Colorado River began flowing about seventy-million years ago. After it began flowing, volcano explosions and other natural events changed the river’s path many times.
　　About seventeen-million years ago, pressures deep in the Earth pushed up the land through which the river flowed. The river continued to flow through the area, cutting deeper into the rock.
　　The Grand Canyon is twenty-nine kilometers across at the widest place, and more than one and one-half kilometers deep. At the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where the river flows today, the rock is almost two-thousand-million years old.

　　In Eighteen-Sixty-Nine, not many people expected John Wesley Powell and his team of explorers to survive the trip through the Grand Canyon. No one had ever done it before.
　　There are many dangers on the fast-moving river. Rocks hidden under the water can smash small boats. In places where the river is narrow, the water becomes violent as it rushes between high rock walls. Also, there are rapids of fast moving water in places where the river drops to a lower level. In some places, strong currents can push a boat into rocks in the water, or against the walls of the canyon.
　　Major Powell knew the trip would be dangerous. When the boats came near a rapid, he and his crew would stop. Sometimes they decided to go through by rowing the boats with their oars, as they did in calm water. At other times they carried the boats and all their equipment around dangerous rapids. Major Powell wrote every day in a book about what they did and saw. This is how he described the difficulties of one day:

　　“We carried the boats around rapids two times this morning... During the afternoon we ran a narrow part of the river, more than half a mile in length, narrow and rapid. We float on water that is flowing down a gliding plane. At the bottom of the narrow part of the river, the river turns sharply to the right, and the water rolls up against a rock that seems to be in the middle of the stream. We pull with all our power to the right, but it seems impossible to avoid being carried against the cliff, and we are carried up high on the waves – not against the rocks, for the water strikes us and we are pushed back and pass on with safety...”

　More than three months after starting, Major Powell and his group reached the end of the Grand Canyon. Three men had left the group earlier and were never seen again. Two of the men in the group continued down the river to the sea, becoming the first people known to have traveled the entire length of the Colorado River.

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　Today, the Grand Canyon is in a national park. About five-million people visit it each year. They stop at its edge and look in wonder at a place that can create great emotions in those seeing it. Others walk down the many paths into the canyon.
　　Some ride rubber boats down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. River guides are experts at taking the boats through the most violent rapids. This activity, called white-water rafting, is very popular.

　　Generally, the trip takes about two weeks in boats that carry three or four people. Bigger boats with motors that carry about twenty people can make the trip in several days. As people float down the river, they see the many wonderful and strange shapes created by the forces of nature. They may see animals, such as bighorn sheep, and coyotes. They experience the excitement of traveling through white-water rapids, and sleeping under the stars.
　　The sound of the river is always present, sometimes loud, sometimes soft. After several days traveling on and sleeping near the river as it flows through the Grand Canyon, many visitors say they feel their cares and worries leave them. Their concerns are replaced by a feeling of wonder about the canyon and the powers of nature.

　And this is Steve Ember with the VOA Special English program EXPLORATIONS. Today we tell about discoveries of the past on the island of Saint John, in the United States Virgin Islands. Saint John covers forty-nine square kilometers of land between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, east of Puerto Rico.

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　　When many people think about the Virgin Islands, they think of a beautiful holiday place with bright sunshine and clear blue seas. But serious science is also taking place on Saint John.
　　Archeologists have uncovered a ceremonial center near the waters of Saint John’s Cinnamon Bay. A tribal people called the Taino (Tah-EE-no) created the area. The Taino may have used this place for religious purposes hundreds of years ago. Near the ceremonial site, archeologists have found evidence of a fire from a slave rebellion that took place in seventeen-thirty-three. Another archeology project has just begun around Saint John -- a search for sunken ships. National Park Service archeologist Ken Wild designed the projects. Investigation into the island’s past has become a community effort on Saint John. Thousands of volunteers from the island and the United States mainland give their time to help.

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　　Some experts say the Taino were the first people Italian explorer Christopher Columbus saw when he came to the Americas in the fifteenth century. The Taino are believed to have lived on a number of other islands including the Bahamas, Cuba and Puerto Rico.
　　Columbus led explorations for Spain in fourteen-ninety-two and fourteen-ninety-three. He wrote a record of his travels. He probably found the Taino people when he landed on an island in the Caribbean Sea, in what is now called the West Indies. It is unclear which island this was. However, many experts say it was in the Bahamas or Turks islands. Columbus said the Taino were friendly. He said they helped guide his crew around the islands. He also commented on the fact that they wore few clothes.

　　Work to uncover the Taino ceremonial area began in nineteen-ninety-eight. That was three years after a huge ocean storm struck the island. The storm removed some of the sand between the archeological site and Cinnamon Bay. Experts recognized that the water would someday cover the site. Sand on the beach is continually being washed away. The ceremonial area contains levels of animal remains and clay containers for food. Some pieces of pottery have round holes in the bottom. Among some tribal groups in the Americas, this meant that the people had opened a space for the spirit to escape.

　Mister Wild says objects were placed in the ceremonial area during hundreds of years. He believes they were offerings to Taino ancestors or to very powerful gods. A road built by planters in the early eighteenth century over the area protected these objects for almost three-hundred years. Each object appears to be where someone placed it centuries ago. Objects closer to the surface have images with more detail than those below. Images on the pottery have noses similar to a bat, an animal that looks like a mouse with wings. The Tainos are thought to have considered the bat a holy creature. They believed it contained the spirits of the dead.

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　　The discoveries in Cinnamon Bay mark the first time a Taino ceremonial area has been recognized in the Caribbean. Historians and archeologists say the Taino raised crops and fished. They lived in round houses. They traveled between islands in huge canoes made from trees. The Taino appear to have had a well organized government system.
　　Before Spanish settlers arrived, the Taino had a legend, a story repeated over time. It said people covered with clothes would someday make them slaves.
　　Sadly, the legend came true. Colonists from Spain made the islanders work very hard and fed them little. The Spanish may also have brought diseases to the islanders. The native people died very quickly from these diseases. The protective systems of their bodies had no defenses against European diseases.

　　Not many years after Columbus sailed into the area, the Taino population had sharply decreased. Spain gave independence to the island people in fifteen-forty-two. But by that time, few Taino remained alive.
　　Some experts believe the Taino people disappeared several hundred years ago. Their population died out in Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Cuba. But some Taino live today in Puerto Rico and the southern Caribbean islands near South America.
　　Members a tribal group in Puerto Rico say their genetic material proves they are Taino. They live in a very large central mountain territory of the island.

　　An environmental activist from the state of Connecticut helped launch the archeological exploration at Cinnamon Bay. Investment banker S. Donald Sussman gave two-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars for a year of digging.
　　Most project money today comes from gifts. An organization called the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park helps the archeology. So do an island gift shop and other businesses.
　　After a short training period, community volunteers from Saint John help find and clean objects from the past. So do visitors spending a holiday on the island. School children and people of all ages aid in the work. Volunteers give an average of about one-thousand hours a year to the archeology projects.

　　Students from Syracuse University in Syracuse, New York recently completed an intensive course in archeology on Saint John. They studied objects from the remains of an early cotton farm. This seventeenth-century plantation is near the site of the ceremonial area. In the eighteenth century, sugar grew on this same land. Working on the site gives students a chance to study the relationship between African slaves and European plantation owners.
　　Several years ago Syracuse students uncovered the remains of a house for laborers. They also discovered a building that served as a home and storage area for the plantation owners. One level of the area shows evidence of a fire. The Syracuse experts say the burning took place during the Saint John slave rebellion of seventeen-thirty-three.

　　After Christopher Columbus explored the area, people from England, France and Spain all fought to control Saint John. In seventeen-seventeen, settlers from Denmark bought the island from France.
　　In seventeen-thirty-three, more than one-thousand African slaves worked on Saint John under Danish control. They worked on plantations that grew sugar, cotton and other crops. Lack of rain had caused a food shortage. The slaves raised their own food. But the crops failed. The people were starving to death.
　　Their owners feared the slaves might rebel. So the owners established extremely restrictive and cruel laws. These laws threatened terrible punishments for even the smallest violations.

　　The slaves were caught between starvation and the cruelty of the laws. They decided to fight back. They attacked and captured the local fort. They held out for six months. But finally, the Danish governor brought in additional forces from the French West Indies. They crushed the rebellion. Some of the slaves who were not captured killed themselves. They did so to prevent being tortured to death. Denmark owned Saint John until nineteen-seventeen. Then the United States bought the island.

[rm=300,2]http://i6.sina.com.cn/edu/specialenglish/exploration/voa26.mp3[/rm]

　　Syracuse University officials say the archeological work at Cinnamon Bay marks the first study of settlement in the area. They say the effort will add to increasing research about relations between Africans and Europeans in the area. Later this month, students from the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, also will work on Saint John for one week. They will begin a comparison study of cultural changes in native Americans over the years.
　　A recent visitor to Saint John said he went to the island to swim and enjoy the sunshine. But he said the most interesting part of his visit was seeing evidence of the island’s past.

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