ause; but, on the
whole, the purplish cast seems to be inherent. This is the dominant
color of the canon, for the expanse of the rock surface displayed is
more than half in the Red Wall group."

I was continually likening this to a vast city rather than a landscape,
but it was a city of no man's creation nor of any man's conception. In
the visions which inspired or crazy painters have had of the New
Jerusalem, of Babylon the Great, of a heaven in the atmosphere, with
endless perspective of towers and steeps that hang in the twilight sky,
the imagination has tried to reach this reality. But here are effects
beyond the artist, forms the architect has not hinted at; and yet
everything reminds us of man's work. And the explorers have tried by the
use of Oriental nomenclature to bring it within our comprehension, the
East being the land of the imagination. There is the Hindoo
Amphitheatre, the Bright Angel Amphitheatre, the Ottoman Amphitheatre,
Shiva's Temple, Vishnu's Temple, Vulcan's Throne. And here, indeed, is
the idea of the pagoda architecture, of the terrace architecture, of the
bizarre constructions which rise with projecting buttresses, rows of
pillars, recesses, battlements, esplanades, and low walls, hanging
gardens, and truncated pinnacles. It is a city, but a city of the
imagination. In many pages I could tell what I saw in one day's lounging
for a mile or so along the edge of the precipice. The view changed at
every step, and was never half an hour the same in one place. Nor did it
need much fancy to create illusions or pictures of unearthly beauty.
There was a castle, terraced up with columns, plain enough, and below it
a parade-ground; at any moment the knights in armor and with banners
might emerge from the red gates and deploy there, while the ladies
looked down from the balconies. But there were many castles and
fortresses and barracks and noble mansions. And the rich sculpture in
this brilliant color! In time I began to see queer details: a Richardson
house, with low portals and round arches, surmounted by a Nuremberg
gable; perfect panels, 600 feet high, for the setting of pictures; a
train of cars partly derailed at the door of a long, low warehouse, with
a garden in front of it. There was no end to such devices.

It was long before I could comprehend the vastness of the view, see the
enormous chasms and rents and seams, and the many architectural ranges
separated by great gulfs, between me and the wa