r
seen or heard of. Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar-Creek
Bridge, and the Mammoth Cave, when I speak thus of the _Church Buttes_.

They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road
passes by their side. They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown
in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the
perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series
of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which
is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter's, and completely relieved from
the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with the
main precipice. The perfect symmetry of this marvellous structure would
ravish Michel Angelo. So far from requiring an effort of imagination to
recognize the propriety of its name, this church almost staggers belief
in the unassisted naturalness of its architecture. It belongs to a style
entirely its own. Its main and lower portion is not divided into nave
and transept, but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on
their bases, and united with reentrant angles, their convex surfaces
toward us, so that the ground-plan might be called a species of
quatre-foil. In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned
door-way, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted
mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel
like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know
the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with
flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with
grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size,
representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are
costumed in the style of religious art, with flowing sacerdotal
garments.

The structure terminates above in a double dome, whose figure may be
imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large
one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in
proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and
each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half
column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite
columnar _entourage_ of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of
Pisa. The result of this arrangement is an aerial, yet massive beauty,
without parallel in the architecture of the world. I have not conveyed