tures
appears. Every building, however complicated and laden with ornamental
lines, is at one with itself and every one of its neighbors, for the
same characteristic controlling belts of color and solid strata extend
with wonderful constancy for very great distances, and pass through and
give style to thousands of separate structures, however their smaller
characters may vary.

Of all the various kinds of ornamental work displayed,--carving, tracery
on cliff-faces, moldings, arches, pinnacles,--none is more admirably
effective or charms more than the webs of rain-channeled taluses.
Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of waste or
excess, they cover roofs and dome-tops and the base of every cliff,
belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in beautiful
continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and out around
all the intricate system of side-canons, amphitheaters, cirques, and
scallops into which they are sculptured. From one point hundreds of miles
of this fairy embroidery may be traced. It is all so fine and orderly
that it would seem that not only had the clouds and streams been kept
harmoniously busy in the making of it, but that every raindrop sent like
a bullet to a mark had been the subject of a separate thought, so sure is
the outcome of beauty through the stormy centuries. Surely nowhere else
are there illustrations so striking of the natural beauty of desolation
and death, so many of nature's own mountain buildings wasting in glory of
high desert air--going to dust. See how steadfast in beauty they all are
in their going. Look again and again how the rough, dusty boulders and
sand of disintegration from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty the next
and next below with these wonderful taluses, and how the colors are finer
the faster the waste. We oftentimes see nature giving beauty for ashes,--as
in the flowers of a prairie after fire,--but here the very dust and ashes
are beautiful.

Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once unbroken
plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge beds of rocks.
Other valleys of erosion are as great,--in all their dimensions some