time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents rushing the fallen material
to the river, keeping the wall rocks constantly exposed. Thus the cañon
grows wider and deeper. So also do the side-cañons and amphitheaters,
while secondary gorges and cirques gradually isolate masses of the
promontories, forming new buildings, all of which are being weathered
and pulled and shaken down while being built, showing destruction and
creation as one. We see the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest
attitudes, wearing their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off
showers of red and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their
leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with
the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.

Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
sediments--sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
with the remains of animals, and that every particle of the sandstones
and limestones of these wonderful structures was derived from other
landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes, and
other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the cañon, we
discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general
denudation of the region compared with which even that carried away
in the making of the Grand Cañon is as nothing. Thus each wonder in
sight becomes a window through which other wonders come to view. In no
other part of this continent are the wonders of geology, the records of
the world's auld lang syne, more widely opened, or displayed in higher
piles. The whole cañon is a mine of fossils, in which five thousand feet
of horizontal strata are exposed in regular succession over more than a
thousand square miles of wall-space, and on the adjacent plateau region
there is another series of beds twice as thick, forming a grand geological
library--a collection of stone books covering thousands of miles of