hemmed in by walls fifteen hundred feet in height. Only one thing was
certain: these altitudes were gradually diminishing; and hence they knew
that they were mounting the plateau. At last, four hours after leaving
Diamond Creek, wearied to the marrow with incessant toil, they halted by a
little spring, stretched themselves on a scrap of starveling grass, and
chewed their meagre, musty supper.

The scenery here was unearthly. Barring the bit of turf and a few willows
which had got lost in the desert, there was not a tint of verdure. To
right and left rose two huge and steep slopes of eroded and ragged rocks,
tortured into every conceivable form of jag, spire, pinnacle, and imagery.
In general the figures were grotesque; it seemed as if the misshapen gods
of India and of China and of barbarous lands had gathered there; as if
this were a place of banishment and punishment for the fallen idols of all
idolatries. Above this coliseum of monstrosities rose a long line of
sharp, jagged needles, like a vast _chevaux-de-frise_, forbidding escape.
Still higher, lighted even yet by the setting sun, towered five cones of
vast proportions. Then came cliffs capped by shatters of tableland, and
then the long, even, gleaming ledge of the final plateau.

Locked in this bedlam of crazed strata, unable to see or guess a way out
of it, the wanderers fell asleep. There was no setting of guards; they
trusted to the desert as a sentinel.

At daylight the blind and wearisome climbing recommenced. Occasionally
they found patches of thin turf and clumps of dwarf cedars struggling with
the rocky waste. These bits of greenery were not the harbingers of a new
empire of vegetation, but the remnants of one whose glory had vanished
ages ago, swept away by a vandalism of waters. Gradually the canon
dwindled to a ravine, narrow, sinuous, walled in by stony steeps or
slopes, and interlocking continually with other similar chasms. A creek,
which followed the chasm, appeared and disappeared at intervals of a mile
or so, as if horrified at the face of nature and anxious to hide from it
in subterranean recesses.

The travellers stumbled on until the ravine became a gully and the gully a
fissure. They stepped out of it; they were on the rolling surface of the
tableland; they were half a mile above the Colorado.

Here they halted, gave three cheers, and then looked back upon the
northern desert as men look who have escaped an enemy. A gigantic panorama
of