above their foundations, each successive story or superstructure
faced by a huge vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that
connects it with the story next below. The slopes or taluses
represent the softer rock, the vertical walls the harder layers.
Usually four or five of these receding stories make up each temple
or pyramid. Some of the larger structures show all the strata from
the cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the top to the gray
Cambrian sandstone at the bottom. From others, such as the Temple of
Isis, all the upper formations are gone with a pile of disintegrated
red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on the top where the
fragment of the old red wall made its last stand. In those masses,
which are still crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how
surely the process of disintegration is going on by the fragments
and debris of light gray rock, like the chips of giant workmen, that
strew the deeper-colored slopes below them. These fragments fade out
as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had melted like bits of
ice. Indeed, the melting of ice and the dissolution of a rock do not
differ much except that one is very rapid and the other infinitely
slow. In time (not man's time, but the Lord's time), all these light
masses that cap the huge temples will be weathered away, yea, and
all the vast red layers beneath them, and the huge structures will
be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado River will carry their
ashes to the sea, and where they once stood will be seen gray,
desert-like plateaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons
from which the flesh has been removed--sharp, angular, obtrusive,
but bound together as by ligaments of granite. The tooth of time
gnaws at them day and night and has been gnawing for thousands of
centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps remain. From the
Temple of Isis and the Tomb of Odin the two or three upper stories
are gone.