racteristic color. The summit limestone-beds are
pale yellow; next below these are the beautiful rose-colored cross-bedded
sandstones; next there are a thousand feet of brilliant red sandstones;
and below these the red wall limestones, over two thousand feet thick,
rich massy red, the greatest and most influential of the series, and
forming the main color-fountain. Between these are many neutral-tinted
beds. The prevailing colors are wonderfully deep and clear, changing and
blending with varying intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season to
season; throbbing, wavering, glowing, responding to every passing cloud
or storm, a world of color in itself, now burning in separate rainbow bars
streaked and blotched with shade, now glowing in one smooth, all-pervading
ethereal radiance like the alpenglow, uniting the rocky world with the
heavens.

The dawn, as in all the pure, dry desert country, is ineffably beautiful;
and when the first level sunbeams sting the domes and spires, with what a
burst of power the big, wild days begin! The dead and the living, rocks
and hearts alike, awake and sing the new-old song of creation. All the
massy headlands and salient angles of the walls, and the multitudinous
temples and palaces, seem to catch the light at once, and cast thick black
shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing out details as well as the main
massive features of the architecture; while all the rocks, as if wild with
life, throb and quiver and glow in the glorious sunburst, rejoicing. Every
rock temple then becomes a temple of music; every spire and pinnacle an
angel of light and song, shouting color halleluiahs.

As the day draws to a close, shadows, wondrous, black, and thick, like
those of the morning, fill up the wall hollows, while the glowing rocks,
their rough angles burned off, seem soft and hot to the heart as they
stand submerged in purple haze, which now fills the canon like a sea.
Still deeper, richer, more divine grow the great walls and temples, until
in the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole canon is transfigured,
as if all the life and light of centuries of sunshine stored up and
condensed in the rocks was now being poured forth as from one glorious
fountain, flooding both earth and sky.

Strange to say, in the full white effulgence of the midday hours the bright
colors grow dim and terrestrial in common gray haze; and the rocks, after
the manner of mountains, seem to crouch and drowse and shrin