merable monuments, more or less enormous, commemorative of
combats. There had been interminable strife here between the demons of
earth and the demons of water, and each side had set up its trophies. It
was the Vatican and the Catacombs of the Genii; it was the museum and the
mausoleum of the forces of nature.

At various points tributary gorges, the graves of fluvial gods who had
perished long ago, opened into the main canon. In passing these the
voyagers had momentary glimpses of sublimities and horrors which seemed
like the handiwork of that "anarch old," who wrought before the shaping of
the universe. One of these sarcophagi was a narrow cleft, not more than
eighty feet broad, cut from surface to base of a bed of sandstone
one-third of a mile in depth. It was inhabited by an eternal gloom which
was like the shadow of the blackness of darkness. The stillness, the
absence of all life whether animal or vegetable, the dungeon-like
closeness of the monstrous walls, were beyond language.

Another gorge was a ruin. The rock here being of various degrees of
density, the waters had essayed a thousand channels. All the softer veins
had been scooped out and washed away, leaving the harder blocks and masses
piled in a colossal grotesque confusion. Along the sloping sides of the
gap stood bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering
over each other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of
misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while
staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for
this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of
consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only "look
and pass on."

At one point two lateral canons opened side by side upon the San Juan. The
partition was a stupendous pile of rock fifteen hundred feet in altitude,
but so narrow that it seemed to the voyagers below like the single
standing wall of some ruined edifice. Although the space on its summit was
broad enough for a cathedral, it did not appear to them that it would
afford footing to a man, while the enclosing fissures looked narrow enough
to be crossed at a bound. On either side of this isolated bar of sandstone
a plumb-line might have been dropped straight to the level of the river.
The two chasms were tombs of shadow, where nothing ever stirred but winds.

The solitude of this continuous panorama of precipices was remarka