to the southwest, I could look off into the canyons of
the Virgen River, down into the canyon of the Kanab, and far away into
the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. From the lowlands of the Great Basin
and from the depths of the Grand Canyon clouds crept up over the cliffs
and floated over the landscape below me, concealing the canyons and
mantling the mountains and mesas and buttes; still on toward me the
clouds rolled, burying the landscape in their progress, until at last
the region below was covered by a mantle of storm--a tumultuous sea of
rolling clouds, black and angry in parts, white as the foam of cataracts
here and there, and everywhere flecked with resplendent sheen. Below me
spread a vast ocean of vapor, for I was above the clouds. On descending
to the plateau, I found that a great storm had swept the land, and the
dry arroyos of the day before were the channels of a thousand streams of
tawny water, born of the ocean of vapor which had invaded the land
before my vision.

Below the Pink Cliffs another irregular zone of plateaus is found,
stretching out to the margin of the Gray Cliffs. The Gray Cliffs are
composed of a homogeneous sandstone which in some places weathers gray,
but in others is as white as virgin snow. On the top of these cliffs
hills and sand-dunes are found, but everywhere on the Gray Cliff margin
the rocks are carved in fantastic forms; not in buttes and towers and
pinnacles, but in great rounded bosses of rock.

The Virgen River heads back in the Pink Cliffs of the Markagunt Plateau
and with its tributaries crosses one of these plateaus above the Gray
Cliffs, carving a labyrinth of deep gorges. This is known as the Colob
Plateau. Above, there is a vast landscape of naked, white and gray
sandstone, billowing in fantastic bosses. On the margins of the canyons
these are rounded off into great vertical walls, and at the bottom of
every winding canyon a beautiful stream of water is found running over
quicksands. Sometimes the streams in their curving have cut under the
rocks, and overhanging cliffs of towering altitudes are seen; and somber
chambers are found between buttresses that uphold the walls. Among the
Indians this is known as the "Rock Rovers' Land," and is peopled by
mythic beings of uncanny traits.

Below the Gray Cliffs another zone of plateaus is found, separated by
the north-and-south faults and divided from the Colob series by the Gray
Cliffs and demarcated from the plateaus to the