The Bighorn and the Antelope. 141 



to bear in mind that they lie on the sites of some of the old lakes already 

 referred to, and that they have been carved out of flat sheets of sandstone, 

 clay, marl, or limestone that accumulated on the floors of these lakes. 

 Everywhere, therefore, horizontal lines of stratification meet the eye, giving 

 alternate stripes of buff, yellow, white, or red, with here and there a strange 

 verdigris-like green. These strata extend nearly horizontally for hundreds 

 of square miles. But they have been most unequally eroded. Here and there 

 isolated flat-topped eminences, or " buttes," as they are styled in the West, 

 rise from the plain in front of a line of buff or cliff to a height of several 

 hundred feet. On examination, each of these hills is found to be built up 

 of horizontal strata, and the same beds reappear in lines of terraced cliff 

 along the margin of the Plain. A butte is only a remnant of the original 

 deep mass of horizontal strata that once stretched far across the Plain. Its 

 sides and the fronts of the terraced cliffs, utterly verdureless and bare, have 

 been scarped into recesses and projecting buttresses. These have been 

 further cut down into a labyrinth of peaks and columns, clefts and ravines, 

 now strangely monumental, now uncouthly irregular, till the eye grows 

 weary with the endless variety and novelty of the forms. Yet beneath all 

 this chaos of outline there can be traced everywhere the level parallel bars 

 of the strata. The same band of rock, originally one of the successive 

 floors of the old lake, can be followed without bend or break from chasm 

 to chasm and pinnacle to pinnacle. Tumultuous as the surface may be,, 

 it has no relation to underground disturbances, for the rocks are as level 

 and unbroken as when they were laid down. It owes its ruggedness 

 entirely to erosion. 



But there is a further feature adding to the repulsiveness of the 

 " bad lands." There are no springs or streams. Into the soil, parched 

 by the fierce heats of a torrid summer, the moisture of the subsoil ascends 

 by capillary attraction, carrying with it the saline solutions it has extracted 

 from the rocks. At the surface it is at once evaporated, leaving behind a 

 white crust or efflorescence, which covers the bare ground and encrusts the 

 pebbles strewn thereon. Vegetation wholly fails, save here and there 

 a bunch of salt weed or a bunch of the ubiquitous sage-brush, the 

 parched, livid green of which serves only to increase the desolation of the 

 desert. 



A broad vista of such verdureless bad-land " buttes " or peaks, 

 lighted up by the intensely searching achromatic sunlight peculiar 

 to these regions, where the glaring brilliancy of day is unrelieved 

 by shadow or nebulous half -distances, leaves on one's mind the 



