building notching the horizon,--an asylum, a seminary, a hotel,--but
it is only a fragment of red sandstone, carved out by wind and rain.

Presently the high colors of the rocks appear--high cliffs with
terra-cotta facades, and a new look in the texture of the rocks, a
soft, beaming, less frowning expression, and colored as if by the
Western sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks geologically
than we see at home, and they have the tints and texture of youth.
The landscape and the mountains look young, because they look
unfinished, like a house half up. The workmen have but just knocked
off work to go to dinner; their great trenches, their freshly opened
quarries, their huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean
masonry, their half-finished structures breaking the horizon-lines,
their square gashes through the mountains,--all impress the eyes of
a traveler from the eastern part of the continent, where the
earth-building and earth-carving forces finished their work ages
ago.




II



Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand canon of the Colorado,
if he has kept his eyes and mind open, he is prepared to see
striking and unusual things. But he cannot be fully prepared for
just what he does see, no matter how many pictures of it he may have
seen, or how many descriptions of it he may have read.