the rock-masses of the Colorado would crumble much more rapidly than
they do here. The lines of many of these natural temples or
fortresses are still more lengthened and attenuated than those of
the Temple of Isis, appearing like mere skeletons of their former
selves. The forms that weather out the formation above this, the
Permian, appear to be more rotund, and tend more to domes and
rounded hills.

One of the most surprising features of the Grand canon is its
cleanness--its freedom from debris. It is a home of the gods, swept
and garnished; no litter or confusion or fragments of fallen and
broken rocky walls anywhere. Those vast sloping taluses are as clean
as a meadow; rarely at the foot of the huge vertical walls do you
see a fragment of fallen rock. It is as if the processes of erosion
and degradation were as gentle as the dews and the snows, and carved
out this mighty abyss grain by grain, which has probably been the
case. That much of this red sandstone, from the amount of iron it
contains, or from some other cause, disintegrates easily and
rapidly, is very obvious. Looking down from Hopi Point upon a vast
ridge called the "Man-of-War," one sees on the top, where once there
must have been a huge wall of rock, a long level area of red soil
that suggests a garden, the more so because it is regularly divided
up into sections by straight lines of huge stone placed as if by the
hands of man.

One's sense of the depths of the canyon is so great that it almost
makes one dizzy to see the little birds fly out over it, or plunge
down into it. One seems to fear that they too will get dizzy and
fall to the bottom. We watched a line of tourists on mules creeping
along the trail across the inner plateau, and the unaided eye had