ke cracks in a dry clay-bed,
or the narrow slit crevasses of glaciers,--blackened with lava-flows,
dotted with volcanoes and beautiful buttes, and lined with long continuous
escarpments,--a vast bed of sediments of an ancient sea-bottom, still
nearly as level as when first laid down after being heaved into the sky
a mile or two high.

Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Canon City,
we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire effects so
great from means apparently so simple: rain striking light hammer-blows
or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air and light, gentle
sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river sawing the plateau
asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste, and exposing the
edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents sawing cross-streets
and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way in hundreds of sections,
the softer, less resisting beds weathering and receding faster, thus
undermining the harder beds, which fall, not only in small weathered
particles, but in heavy sheer-cleaving masses, assisted down from time to
time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents rushing the fallen material
to the river, keeping the wall rocks constantly exposed. Thus the canon
grows wider and deeper. So also do the side-canons and amphitheaters,
while secondary gorges and cirques gradually isolate masses of the
promontories, forming new buildings, all of which are being weathered
and pulled and shaken down while being built, showing destruction and
creation as one. We see the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest
attitudes, wearing their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off
showers of red and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their
leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with
the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.

Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
sediments--sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
with the remains of animals, and that every particle of the sandstones
and limestones of these wonderful structures was derived from other
landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes, and
other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the canon, we
discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general
denudation of the region