eneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the
level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau whose opposite shore
is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge architectural forms,
endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices,
festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper
cliffs, and painted with every color known to the palette in pure
transparent tones of marvellous delicacy. Never was picture more
harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes
instant communication of all that architecture and painting and
music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is
the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.

"The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the
outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty
one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep,
half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it
baffle human grasp. Something may be gleaned from the account given
by geologists. What is known to them as the Grand Canyon district
lies principally in northwestern Arizona, its length from northwest
to southeast in a straight line being about one hundred and eighty
miles, its width one hundred and twenty-five miles, and its total
area some fifteen thousand square miles. Its northerly beginning,
at the high plateaus in southern Utah, is a series of terraces,
many miles broad, dropping like a stairway step by step to
successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the
platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends
southward beyond, far into the central part of that territory. It
is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have
been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform,
whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the
deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian,
Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong above this
Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the
beginning of the northern terraces referred to. The theory is
fortified by many evidences supplied by examination of the
district, where, more than anywhere else, mother earth has laid
bare the secrets of her girlhood. The climax in this extrao