and
there. Compact Mormon churches are in every settlement, however small.
The men are bearded, coatless, and wear baggy trousers, suggestive of
Holland. Bronzed and deliberate women, who drive teams and work the
fields with the men, wear old-fashioned sunbonnets. Many of these people
have never seen a railroad-train. Newspapers are scarce and long past
date. Here Mormonism of the older fashion is a living religion,
affecting the routine of daily life.

Dixie is a land of plenty, but it is a foreign land. It is reminiscent,
with many differences, of an Algerian oasis. The traveller is immensely
interested. Somehow these strange primitive villages, these simple,
earnest, God-fearing people, merge into unreality with the desert, the
sage-dotted mountains, the cedar-covered slopes, the blooming valleys,
the colored sands, and the vivid cliffs.

Through Bellevue, Toquerville, the ruins of Virgin City, Rockville, and
finally to Springdale winds the road. Meantime the traveller has speeded
south under the Hurricane Cliff, which is the ragged edge left when all
the land west of it sank two thousand feet during some geologic time
long past. He reaches the Virgin River where it emerges from the great
cliffs in whose recesses it is born, and whence it carries in its broad
muddy surge the products of their steady disintegration.

From here on, swinging easterly up-stream, sensation hastens to its
climax. Here the Hurricane Cliff sends aloft an impressive butte painted
in slanting colors and capped with black basalt. Farther on a rugged
promontory striped with vivid tints pushes out from the southern wall
nearly to the river's brink. The cliffs on both sides of the river are
carved from the stratum which geologists call the Belted Shales.
Greenish-grays, brownish-yellows, many shades of bright red, are
prominent; it is hard to name a color or shade which is not represented
in its horizontal bands. "The eye tires and the mind flags in their
presence," writes Professor Willis T. Lee. "To try to realize in an
hour's time the beauty and variety of detail here presented is as
useless as to try to grasp the thoughts expressed in whole rows of
volumes by walking through a library."

Far up the canyon which North Creek pushes through this banded cliff,
two towering cones of glistening white are well named Guardian
Angels--of the stream which roars between their feet. Eagle Crag, which
Moran painted, looms into view. On the south appear