ly moved his lips;
he was whispering a name. Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a
month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered
him an eccentric.

"Naterally not quite himself," judged the skipper. "Some folks is born
knocked on the head."

"May be officers is always that a way," was one of Sweeny's suggestions.
"It must be mighty dull bein' an officer."

We must not forget the Great Canon. The voyagers were amid magnitudes and
sublimities of nature which oppressed as if they were powers and
principalities of supernature. They were borne through an architecture of
aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled
by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and
stonehenges.

For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a
jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head
towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides
curved into extravagances of dizzy horror. It seemed as if it might be a
pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied
Heaven. On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep
wrinkled the forehead of the precipice. Armies might have been buried in
their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits. They
ran back for many miles; they had once been the channels of streams which
helped to drain the plateau; yet they were merely superficial cracks in
the huge mass of sandstone and limestone; they were scarcely noticeable
features of the Titanic landscape. From this bend forward the beauty of
the canon was sublime, horrible, satanic. Constantly varying, its
transformations were like those of the chief among demons, in that they
were always indescribably magnificent and always indescribably terrible.
Now it was a straight, clean chasm between even hedges of cliff which left
open only a narrow line of the beauty and mercy of the heavens. Again,
where it was entered by minor canons, it became a breach through crowded
pandemoniums of ruined architectures and forsaken, frowning imageries.
Then it led between enormous pilasters, columns, and caryatides, mitred
with conical peaks which had once been ranges of mountains. Juttings and
elevations, which would have been monstrous in other landscapes, were here
but minor decorations.

Something like half of the strata with which earth is sheathed has been
cut through