TIME AND CHANGE 



suggestions, and its opulence of color effects a 

 chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty 

 miles wide, in which Niagara would be only as a 

 picture upon your walls, in which the Pyramids, 

 seen from the rim, would appear only like large 

 tents, in which the largest building upon the earth 

 would dwindle to insignificant proportions. There 

 are amphitheatres and mighty aisles eight miles 

 long and three or four miles wide and three or four 

 thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eight 

 hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves 

 with openings a mile wide; there are niches six hun 

 dred feet high overhung by arched lintels; there are 

 pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to two 

 hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into 

 allusions to the architectural features and sugges 

 tions of the canon, which must play a prominent 

 part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There 

 are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mould 

 ings; there is the semblance of balustrades on the 

 summit of a noble facade. In one of the immense 

 halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines 

 of three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, 

 and behind and above them the suggestion of three 

 more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed, there is such 

 an opulence of architectural forms in this divine 

 abyss as one has never before dreamed of see 

 ing wrought by the blind forces of nature. These 

 forces have here foreshadowed all the noblest archi- 

 50 



