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| | 2. Bird's-Eye View |
 | | The river came to be in a world man would never recognize, one of unbelievable heat and stress and colossal movements, one with little or no vegetation to hold the slopes, only water, wind, and gravity forcing furious erosion. |
 | | The piedmont river flows through its wide and ancient floodplain, collecting islands that fish-trapping Indians were to settle and sculpting the metamorphic rock with its red, blue, and yellow mineral streaks. |
 | | With the coming of man and his self-conscious brain, that river which had flowed cleanly and insistently for eons was no longer to be defined solely by its relationship with the soil and rock. |
| www.vcu.edu /engweb/Rivertime/chp2.htm (1250 words) |
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