ck, rich massy red, the greatest and most influential of the
series, and forming the main color-fountain. Between these are many
neutral-tinted beds. The prevailing colors are wonderfully deep and
clear, changing and blending with varying intensity from hour to hour,
day to day, season to season; throbbing, wavering, glowing, responding
to every passing cloud or storm, a world of color in itself, now burning
in separate rainbow bars streaked and blotched with shade, now glowing
in one smooth, all-pervading ethereal radiance like the alpenglow,
uniting the rocky world with the heavens.

The dawn, as in all the pure, dry desert country is ineffably beautiful;
and when the first level sunbeams sting the domes and spires, with what
a burst of power the big, wild days begin! The dead and the living,
rocks and hearts alike, awake and sing the new-old song of creation.
All the massy headlands and salient angles of the walls, and the
multitudinous temples and palaces, seem to catch the light at once, and
cast thick black shadows athwart hollow and gorge, bringing out details
as well as the main massive features of the architecture; while all the
rocks, as if wild with life, throb and quiver and glow in the glorious
sunburst, rejoicing. Every rock temple then becomes a temple of music;
every spire and pinnacle an angel of light and song, shouting color
hallelujahs.

As the day draws to a close, shadows, wondrous, black, and thick, like
those of the morning, fill up the wall hollows, while the glowing rocks,
their rough angles burned off, seem soft and hot to the heart as they
stand submerged in purple haze, which now fills the canyon like a sea.
Still deeper, richer, more divine grow the great walls and temples,
until in the supreme flaming glory of sunset the whole canyon is
transfigured, as if all the life and light of centuries of sunshine
stored up and condensed in the rocks was now being poured forth as from
one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and sky.

Strange to say, in the full white effulgence of the midday hours the
bright colors grow dim and terrestrial in common gray haze; and the
rocks, after the manner of mountains, seem to crouch and drowse and
shrink to less than half their real stature, and have nothing to say to
one, as if not at home. But it is fine to see how quickly they come
to life and grow radiant and communicative as soon as a band of white
clouds come floating by. As if shouting for joy, they s