ffs; or from the canyon's
bottom we may look up thousands of feet to the cliffed and serrated top
of the doomed plateau. These ornate precipices were carved by trickling
water and tireless winds. These fluted and towered temples of master
decoration were disclosed when watery chisels cut away the sands that
formerly had merged them with the ancient rock, just as the Lion of
Lucerne was disclosed for the joy of the world when Thorwaldsen's chisel
chipped away the Alpine rock surrounding its unformed image.

The colors are even more extraordinary than the forms. The celebrated
Vermilion Cliff, which for more than a hundred miles streaks the desert
landscape with vivid red, here combines spectacularly with the White
Cliff, another famous desert feature--two thousand feet of the red
surmounted by a thousand feet of the white. These constitute the body of
color.

But there are other colors. The Vermilion Cliff rests upon the so-called
Painted Desert stratum, three hundred and fifty feet of a more insistent
red relieved by mauve and purple shale. That in turn rests upon a
hundred feet of brown conglomerate streaked with gray, the grave of
reptiles whose bones have survived a million years or more. And that
rests upon the greens and grays and yellows of the Belted Shales.

Nor is this all, for far in the air above the wonderful White Cliff rise
in places six hundred feet of drab shales and chocolate limestones
intermixed with crimsons whose escaping dye drips in broad vertical
streaks across the glistening white. And even above that, in places, lie
remnants of the mottled, many-colored beds of St. Elmo shales and
limestones in whose embrace, a few hundred miles away, lie embedded the
bones of many monster dinosaurs of ages upon ages ago.

Through these successive layers of sands and shales and limestones, the
deposits of a million years of earth's evolution, colored like a Roman
sash, glowing in the sun like a rainbow, the Virgin River has cut a
vertical section, and out of its sides the rains of centuries of
centuries have detached monster monoliths and temples of marvellous size
and fantastic shape, upon whose many-angled surfaces water and wind have
sculptured ten thousand fanciful designs and decorations.

The way in to this desert masterpiece of southern Utah is a hundred
miles of progressive preparation. From railroad to canyon there is not
an unuseful mile or hour. It is as if all were planned, step by step, to
mak