THE DIVINE ABYSS 



In New Mexico, the canon habit of the erosion 

 forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines 

 are often as architectural in the distance, or arbi- 

 trary, as the sky-line of a city. You may see what 

 you half persuade yourself is a huge brick building 

 notching the horizon, — an asylum, a seminary, a 

 hotel, — but it is only a fragment of red sandstone, 

 carved out by wind and rain. 



Presently the high colors of the rocks appear — 

 high cliffs with terra-cotta fagades, and a new look 

 in the texture of the rocks, a soft, beaming, less 

 frowning expression, and colored as if by the Western 

 sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks 

 geologically than we see at home, and they have the 

 tints and texture of youth. The landscape and 

 the mountains look young, because they look un- 

 finished, like a house half up. The workmen have 

 but just knocked off work to go to dinner; their 

 great trenches, their freshly opened quarries, their 

 huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean 

 masonry, their half -finished structures breaking the 

 horizon-lines, their square gashes through the moun- 

 tains, — all impress the eyes of a traveler from the 

 eastern part of the continent, where the earth- 

 building and earth-carving forces finished their 

 work ages ago. 



45 



