At one time and another, over a span of fifteen years, Moores and I would not so much traverse California as go into it in both directions from the middle. We would hammer the outcrops of Interstate 80 from Nevada to San Francisco, reaching out to related rock even farther than Timbuctoo. Timbuctoo is in Yuba County. The better to understand California, I would follow him to analogous geological field areas in Macedonia and Cyprus-journeys much enhanced by his knowledge of modem Greek. He has read widely in Greek history as well as geologic history, and standing on the steps of the Parthenon he sounds like any other tour guide-recounting wars, explosions, orations, and stolen marbles-until he tells you where the hill itself arrived from, and when, and why the Greeks sited their temple on soluble rock that they knew to be riddled with caverns. Moores has been a counsellor through all my projects in geology, across which time our beards have turned gray. He and his wife, Judy, still live in their tum-of-the-century farmhouse, with its zakelijke energie vergelijken high ceilings, its old two-light windows, its pools of sun on cedar floors. Their children-who were five, eight, and eleven when I met them-are grown and gone. On each of two porches lie big chunks of serpentine-smooth as talc, mottled black and green. When you see rocks like that on a porch, a geologist is inside. In the living room is a framed montage of nine covers from Geology, a magazine introduced in the nineteen-seventies by the Geological Society of America and raised during the editorshiIJ of Eldridge Moores (1981-88) to a level of world importance in the science. Moores is the sort of person who runs up flights of stairs circling elevator shafts, because elevators are so slow. He edited Geology while teaching full time and advancing his own widespread research. The montage was zakelijke energie a gift to him from people at the G.S.A. It includes fumaroles in Iceland, dunes in southern Colorado, orange-hot lava on Kilauea, and a· painting of a Triceratops being eaten alive by a Tyrannosaurus rex. In the heavens close above the struggling creatures is the Apollo Object-an asteroid, roughly six miles in diameter-that is believed to have collided with the earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. In the editor’s notes on the contents page, Moores referred to the painting as “the Last Supper.” There were outraged complaints from geologists.