line of mosque-like temples. How unreal, how spectral it all seemed!
Not a sound or sign of life in the whole painted solitude--a
deserted camp, or one upon which the silence of death had fallen.
Here, in Carboniferous times, grew the gigantic fern-like trees, the
Sigillaria and Lepidodendron, whose petrified trunks, for aeons
buried beneath the deposit of the Permian seas, and then, during
other aeons, slowly uncovered by the gentle action of the eroding
rains, we saw scattered on the ground.

You first see Nature beginning to form the canon habit in Colorado
and making preliminary studies for her masterpiece, the Grand
Canon. Huge square towers and truncated cones and needles and
spires break the horizon-lines. Here all her water-courses, wet or
dry, are deep grooves in the soil, with striking and pretty carvings
and modelings adorning their vertical sides. In the railway cuts you
see the same effects--miniature domes and turrets and other canon
features carved out by the rains. The soil is massive and does not
crumble like ours and seek the angle of repose; it gives way in
masses like a brick wall. It is architectural soil, it seeks
approximately the right angle--the level plain or the vertical wall.
It erodes easily under running water, but it does not slide; sand
and clay are in such proportions as to make a brittle but not a
friable soil.

Before you are out of Colorado, you begin to see these novel
architectural features on the horizon-line--the canon turned bottom
side up, as it were. In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosion
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines are often as
architectural in the distance, or arbitrary, as the sky-line of a
city. You may see what you half persuade yourself is a huge brick