presence. Forgetting
somewhat his anxieties about the loved one whom he had left behind, he
looked about him with some such amazement as if he had been translated
from earth into regions of supernature.

The canon through which he was flying was a groove cut in solid sandstone,
less than two hundred feet wide, with precipitous walls of fifteen hundred
feet, from the summit of which the rock sloped away into buttes and peaks
a thousand feet higher. On every side the horizon was half a mile above
his head. He was in a chasm, twenty-five hundred feet below the average
surface of the earth, the floor of which was a swift river.

He seemed to himself to be traversing the abodes of the Genii. Although he
had only heard of "Vathek," he thought of the Hall of Eblis. It was such
an abyss as no artist has ever hinted, excepting Dore in his picturings of
Dante's "Inferno." Could Dante himself have looked into it, he would have
peopled it with the most hopeless of his lost spirits. The shadow, the
aridity, the barrenness, the solemnity, the pitilessness, the horrid
cruelty of the scene, were more than might be received into the soul. It
was something which could not be imagined, and which when seen could not
be fully remembered. To gaze on it was like beholding the mysterious,
wicked countenance of the father of all evil. It was a landscape which was
a fiend.

The precipices were not bare and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor
finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the
ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them;
they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their
magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his
carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of
brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and
these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect which was prodigious: a
hundred feet in height and miles in length at a stroke of the brush.

The architectural and sculptural results were equally monstrous. There
were lateral shelves twenty feet in width, and thousands of yards in
length. There were towers, pilasters, and formless caryatides, a quarter
of a mile in height. Great bulks projected, capped by gigantic mitres or
diadems, and flanked by cavernous indentations. In consequence of the
varying solidity of the stone, the river had wrought the precipices into a
series of innu