hy gray and bluish; it rose in
a series of terraces to a thousand-feet wall of dark red sandstone,
receding upward, with ranges of columns and many fantastic sculptures,
to a finial row of gigantic opera-glasses 6000 feet above the river. The
great San Francisco Mountain, with its snowy crater, which we had passed
on the way, might have been set down in the place of this one, and it
would have been only one in a multitude of such forms that met the eye
whichever way we looked. Indeed, all the vast mountains in this region
might be hidden in this canon.

Wandering a little away from the group and out of sight, and turning
suddenly to the scene from another point of view, I experienced for a
moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to
be alone in such a presence. With all this grotesqueness and majesty of
form and radiance of color, creation seemed in a whirl. With our
education in scenery of a totally different kind, I suppose it would
need long acquaintance with this to familiarize one with it to the
extent of perfect mental comprehension.

The vast abyss has an atmosphere of its own, one always changing and
producing new effects, an atmosphere and shadows and tones of its
own--golden, rosy, gray, brilliant, and sombre, and playing a thousand
fantastic tricks to the vision. The rich and wonderful color effects,
says Captain Dutton, "are due to the inherent colors of the rocks,
modified by the atmosphere. Like any other great series of strata in the
plateau province, the carboniferous has its own range of colors, which
might serve to distinguish it, even if we had no other criterion. The
summit strata are pale gray, with a faint yellowish cast. Beneath them
the cross-bedded sandstone appears, showing a mottled surface of pale
pinkish hue. Underneath this member are nearly 1000 feet of the lower
Aubrey sandstones, displaying an intensely brilliant red, which is
somewhat marked by the talus shot down from the gray cherty limestone at
the summit. Beneath the lower Aubrey is the face of the Red Wall
limestone, from 2000 to 3000 feet high. It has a strong red tone, but a
very peculiar one. Most of the red strata of the West have the brownish
or vermilion tones, but these are rather purplish red, as if the pigment
had been treated to a dash of blue. It is not quite certain that this
may not arise in part from the intervention of the blue haze, and
probably it is rendered more conspicuous by this c