420 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



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Fig. 3. Nearly Five Thousand Feet of Rock Strata. Opposite, a Wall a Dozen Miles 



Distant. 



above sea level. The distance between the top walls is from three to 

 fifteen miles, and does not accord with the reports and pictures of the 

 early government expeditions to the region. From El Tovar Hotel 

 and the Grand View one sees the canon at its broadest stretch, where 

 for more than fifty miles it is a dozen miles wide and is filled with 

 buttresses and buttes, towering from two to five thousand feet above 

 the river. 



The rim of the northern wall presents a nearly horizontal line. 

 But a bird's-eye view from the western end of the canon would show the 

 country to the east to be divided into four plateaus, each dipping like 

 cakes of ice in a river till met by its neighbor. The plateau north of 

 the visitor at El Tovar Hotel is one of the blocks that has been raised 

 highest and consequently has brought up the lowest rocks and exposed 

 them to the corroding action of the river. 



If with a high buzz-saw we could cut through the country from 

 east to west for three hundred miles and could move out the section 

 nearest us, we should see that the face of the cut opposite is composed 

 of a, series of blocks higher towards the west and slipping down towards 

 the east. What we are unable to do in this regard has in a manner 

 been done for us, since for ages the Colorado Kiver has been eating 

 away and has exposed the outlines of the blocks and the various geo- 

 logical formations so plainly that they are easily distinguished. 



Seated on the rim in some favorable spot, one sees the different 

 formations spread out as clearly as if diagrammed in a text-book on 

 geology. The Kaibab plateau, just to the north shows six or seven 



