times of day and night,
free to observe the vegetation, the fossils in the rocks, the seams
beneath overhanging ledges once inhabited by Indians, and to watch the
stupendous scenery in the changing lights and shadows, clouds, showers,
and storms. One need not go hunting the so-called "points of interest."
The verge anywhere, everywhere, is a point of interest beyond one's
wildest dreams.

As yet, few of the promontories or throng of mountain buildings in the
canon are named. Nor among such exuberance of forms are names thought
of by the bewildered, hurried tourist. He would be as likely to think of
names for waves in a storm. The Eastern and Western Cloisters, Hindu
Amphitheater, Cape Royal, Powell's Plateau, and Grand View Point, Point
Sublime, Bissell and Moran points, the Temple of Set, Vishnu's Temple,
Shiva's Temple, Twin Temples, Tower of Babel, Hance's Column--these fairly
good names given by Dutton, Holmes, Moran, and others are scattered over
a large stretch of the canon wilderness.

All the canon rock-beds are lavishly painted, except a few neutral bars
and the granite notch at the bottom occupied by the river, which makes
but little sign. It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of light,
colored and glowing like oak and maple woods in autumn, when the sun-gold
is richest. I have just said that it is impossible to learn what the
canon is like from descriptions and pictures. Powell's and Dutton's
descriptions present magnificent views not only of the canon but of all
the grand region round about it; and Holmes's drawings, accompanying
Dutton's report, are wonderfully good. Surely faithful and loving skill
can go no further in putting the multitudinous decorated forms on paper.
But the _colors_, the living, rejoicing _colors_, chanting morning and
evening in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or pencil, however lovingly
inspired, can give us these? And if paint is of no effect, what hope
lies in pen-work? Only this: some may be incited by it to go and see
for themselves.

No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same extent
have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored. The famous
Yellowstone Canon below the falls comes to mind, but, wonderful as it
is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with this it is only a
bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines. Each of the series of
level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of the canon has, as we
have seen, its own cha