is side, who eagerly questioned us as to the way to Manitou. He had
lost his way amid these gruesome wonders, and although it was ludicrous
to see his distress, one could not but sympathize with his misery,
while lost in this wild, so full of monsters. I may here quote what
Victor Hugo, in his "Alps and Pyrenees," says of sandstone. It would
seem as if he was actually describing some of the fantastic forms which
we saw in the Garden of the Gods.

"Sandstone," he says, "is the most interesting of stones. There is no
appearance which it does not take, no caprice which it does not have,
no dream which it does not realize. It has every shape; it makes every
grimace. It seems to be animated by a multiple soul. Forgive me the
expression with regard to such a thing.

"In the great drama of the landscape, sandstone plays a fantastic part.
Sometimes it is grand and severe, sometimes buffoon-like; it bends like
a wrestler, it rolls itself up like a clown; it may be a sponge, a
pudding, a tent, a cottage, the stump of a tree; it has faces that
laugh, eyes that look, jaws that seem to bite and munch the ferns; it
seizes the brambles like a giant's fist suddenly issuing from the
earth. Antiquity, which loved perfect allegories, ought to have made
the statue of Proteus of sandstone.

"The aspects presented by sandstone, those curious copies of a thousand
things which it makes, possess this peculiarity: the light of day does
not dissipate them and cause them to vanish. Here at Pasajes, the
mountain, cut and ground away by the rain, the sea, and the wind, is
peopled by the sandstone with a host of stony inhabitants, mute,
motionless, eternal, almost terrifying. Seated with outstretched arms
on the summit of an inaccessible rock at the entrance of the bay, is a
hooded hermit, who, according as the sky is clear or stormy, seems to
be blessing the sea, or warning the mariners. On a desert plateau,
close to heaven, among the clouds, are dwarfs, with beaks like birds,
monsters with human shapes, but with two heads, of which one laughs and
the other weeps--there where there is nothing to make one laugh and
nothing to make one weep. There are the members of a giant, _disjecti
membra gigantis_; here the knee, there the trunk and omoplate, and
there, further off, the head. There is a big-paunched idol with the
muzzle of an ox, necklets about its neck, and two pairs of short, fat
arms, behind which some great bramble-bushes wave like fly-flaps