to any mind an idea of the grandeur of this pile, nor could I, even with
the assistance of a diagram. I can only say that the Cathedral Buttes
are a lesson for the architects of all Christendom,--a purely novel and
original creation, of such marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I
simultaneously exclaimed,--"Oh that the master-builders of the world
could come here even for a single day! The result would be an entirely
new style of architecture,--an American school, as distinct from all the
rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine." If they could come, the
art of building would have a regeneration. "Amazing" is the only word
for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and
prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of
its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues,
made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon-hands for
the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone-dream of
petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of
God, to wait the judgment of Eblis and the earthquakes of the Last Day.

After leaving Church Buttes and passing Fort Bridger, our attention
slept upon what it had seen until we entered the region of the _canons_.
These are defiles, channelled across the whole breadth of the Wahsatch
Mountains almost to the level of their base, walled by precipices of red
sandstone or sugar-loaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of
the Hudson become insignificant as a garden-fence. The least poetical
man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness
as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization, and a
people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the
nineteenth century. During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude
attempts at a fortification of the great Echo Canon, half a day's
journey from his city, and this work still remains intact. He need not
have done it; a hundred men, ambushed among the ledges at the top of the
canon-walls, and well provided with loose rocks and Minie-rifles, could
convert the defile into a new Thermopylae, without exposure to
themselves. In an older and more superstitious age, the unassisted
horrors of Nature herself would have repelled an invading host from the
passage of this grizzly _canon_, as the profane might have been driven
from the galleries of Isis or Eleusis.

About forty miles from Salt Lak