large tents, in which the largest building upon the earth would
dwindle to insignificant proportions. There are amphitheatres and
mighty aisles eight miles long and three or four miles wide and
three or four thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eight
hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves with openings a
mile wide; there are niches six hundred feet high overhung by arched
lintels; there are pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to
two hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into allusions to
the architectural features and suggestions of the canon, which must
play a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There
are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; there is the
semblance of balustrades on the summit of a noble facade. In one of
the immense halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines of
three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, and behind and above
them the suggestion of three more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed,
there is such an opulence of architectural forms in this divine
abyss as one has never before dreamed of seeing wrought by the blind
forces of nature. These forces have here foreshadowed all the
noblest architecture of the world. Many of the vast carved and
ornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly named
temples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile high, carved out of the red
Carboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines.
Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha
Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the
east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster,
and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions of
temples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work of
human hands can rival. "The grandest objects," says Major Dutton,
"are merged in a congregation of others equally grand." With the
wealth of form goes a wealth of color. Never, I venture to say, were