aid down after being
heaved into the sky a mile or two high.

Walking quietly about in the alleys and byways of the Grand Canyon city,
we learn something of the way it was made; and all must admire effects
so great from means apparently so simple; rain striking light hammer
blows or heavier in streams, with many rest Sundays; soft air and light,
gentle sappers and miners, toiling forever; the big river sawing the
plateau asunder, carrying away the eroded and ground waste, and
exposing the edges of the strata to the weather; rain torrents sawing
cross-streets and alleys, exposing the strata in the same way in
hundreds of sections, the softer, less resisting beds weathering and
receding faster, thus undermining the harder beds, which fall, not
only in small weathered particles, but in heavy sheer-cleaving masses,
assisted down from time to time by kindly earthquakes, rain torrents
rushing the fallen material to the river, keeping the wall rocks
constantly exposed. Thus the canyon grows wider and deeper. So also do
the side canyons and amphitheaters, while secondary gorges and cirques
gradually isolate masses of the promontories, forming new buildings,
all of which are being weathered and pulled and shaken down while being
built, showing destruction and creation as one. We see the proudest
temples and palaces in stateliest attitudes, wearing their sheets of
detritus as royal robes, shedding off showers of red and yellow stones
like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to dust like beautiful
days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of angels the natural
beauty of death.

Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
sediments,--sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
with the remains of animals,--and every particle of the sandstones
and limestones of these wonderful structures to be derived from other
landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes, and
other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the canyon, we
discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general
denudation of the region compared with which even that carried away in
the making of the Grand Canyon is as nothing. Thus each wonder in sight
becomes a window through which other wonders come to view. In no other
part of this continent are the wonders of geology, the records of the
world's aul