THE DIVINE ABYSS 



sunk in the plain like a carpenter's groove into a 

 plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, 

 but the earth is a new earth — new geologically, and 

 new in the lines of its landscapes. It seems by the 

 forms she develops that Nature must use tools that 

 she long since discarded in the East. She works as if 

 with the square and the saw and the compass, and 

 uses implements that cut like chisels and moulding- 

 planes. Right lines, well-defined angles, and table- 

 like tops of buttes and mesas alternate with perfect 

 curves, polished domes, carved needles, and fluted 

 escarpments. 



In the features of our older landscapes there is 

 little or nothing that suggests architectural forms 

 or engineering devices; in the Far West one sees 

 such forms and devices everywhere. 



In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Ari- 

 zona we stood on the edge of a great rolling plain 

 and looked down upon a wide, deeply eroded stretch 

 of country below us that suggested a vast army 

 encampment, covered as it was with great dome- 

 shaped, tent-like mounds of a light terra-cotta color, 

 with open spaces like streets or avenues between 

 them. There were hundreds or thousands of these 

 earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. 

 Along the horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, 

 rounded pillars, or a solid line of mosque-like temples. 

 How unreal, how spectral it all seemed ! Not a sound 

 or sign of life in the whole painted solitude — a dcx 



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