Mrs. Stanley had been attending to her
feelings. The elder lady (we dare not yet call her an old lady) was in the
lowest spirits. She tried to brace herself; she crossed her hands behind
her back, man-fashion; she marched up and down the roof man-fashion. All
useless; the transformation didn't work; or, if she was a man, she was a
scared one.

She could not help feeling like one of the spirits in prison as she
glanced at the awful solitude around her. Notwithstanding the river, there
still was the desert. The little plain was but an oasis. Two miles to the
east the San Juan burst out of a defile of sandstone, and a mile to the
west it disappeared in a similar chasm. The walls of these gorges rose
abruptly two thousand feet above the hurrying waters. All around were the
monstrous, arid, herbless, savage, cruel ramparts of the plateau. No
outlook anywhere; the longest reach of the eye was not five miles; then
came towering precipices. The travellers were like ants gathered on an
inch of earth at the bottom of a fissure in a quarry. The horizon was
elevated and limited, resting everywhere on harsh lines of rock which were
at once near the spectator and far above him. The overhanging plateaux
strove to shut him out from the sight of heaven.

What variety there was in the grim monotony appeared in shapes that were
horrible to the weary and sorrowful. On the other side of the San Juan
towered an assemblage of pinnacles which looked like statues; but these
statues were a thousand feet above the stream, and the smallest of them
was at least four hundred feet high. To a lost wanderer, and especially to
a dispirited woman, such magnitude was not sublime, but terrifying. It
seemed as if these shapes were gods who had no mercy, or demons who were
full of malevolence. Still higher, on a jutting crag which overhung the
black river, was a castle a hundred fold huger than man ever built, with
ramparts that were dizzy precipices and towers such as no daring could
scale. It faced the horrible group of stony deities as if it were their
pandemonium.

The whole landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage
giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at
home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The
Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in
such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been
a suitable inhabitant for it