is slowly prepared for the wonders of rock-carving it is to see on
the Colorado. The canyon form seems inherent in soil and rock. The
channels of the little streams are canyons, vertical sides of adobe
soil, as deep as they are broad, rectangle grooves in the ground.

Through all this arid region nature is abrupt, angular, and
sudden--the plain squarely abutting the cliff, the cliff walling the
canon; the dry water-course sunk in the plain like a carpenter's
groove into a plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, but the
earth is a new earth--new geologically, and new in the lines of its
landscapes. It seems by the forms she develops that Nature must use
tools that she long since discarded in the East. She works as if
with the square and the saw and the compass, and uses implements
that cut like chisels and moulding-planes. Right lines,
well-defined angles, and tablelike tops of buttes and mesas
alternate with perfect curves, polished domes, carved needles, and
fluted escarpments.

In the features of our older landscapes there is little or nothing
that suggests architectural forms or engineering devices; in the Far
West one sees such forms and devices everywhere.

In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Arizona we stood on
the edge of a great rolling plain and looked down upon a wide,
deeply eroded stretch of country below us that suggested a vast army
encampment, covered as it was with great dome-shaped, tent-like
mounds of a light terra-cotta color, with open spaces like streets
or avenues between them. There were hundreds or thousands of these
earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. Along the
horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, rounded pillars, or a solid