for themselves.

No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same extent
have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored. The famous
Yellowstone Cañon below the falls comes to mind, but, wonderful as it
is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with this it is only a
bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines. Each of the series of
level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of the cañon has, as we
have seen, its own characteristic color. The summit limestone-beds are
pale yellow; next below these are the beautiful rose-colored cross-bedded
sandstones; next there are a thousand feet of brilliant red sandstones;
and below these the red wall limestones, over two thousand feet thick,
rich massy red, the greatest and most influential of the series, and
forming the main color-fountain. Between these are many neutral-tinted
beds. The prevailing colors are wonderfully deep and clear, changing and
blending with varying intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season to
season; throbbing, wavering, glowing, responding to every passing cloud
or storm, a world of color in itself, now burning in separate rainbow bars
streaked and blotched with shade, now glowing in one smooth, all-pervading
ethereal radiance like the alpenglow, uniting the rocky world with the
heavens.

The dawn, as in all the pure, dry desert country, is ineffably beautiful;
and when the first level sunbeams sting the domes and spires, with what a
burst of power the big, wild days begin! The dead and the living, rocks
and hearts alike, awake and sing the new-old song of creation. All the
massy headlands and salient angles of the walls, and the multitudinous
temples and palaces, seem to catch the light at once, and cast thick black
shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing out details as well as the main
massive features of the architecture; while all the rocks, as if wild with