TIME AND CHANGE 



amphitheatres. The strata dip very gently to the 

 north and northeast, while the slope of the surface 

 is to the south and southeast. This has caused the 

 drainage from the great northern plateaus to flow 

 into the canon and thus cut and carve the north 

 side as we behold it. 



The visitor standing upon the south side looks 

 across the great chasm upon the bewildering maze 

 of monumental forms, some of them as suggestive 

 of human workmanship as anything in nature well 

 can be, — crumbling turrets and foundations, forms 

 as distinctly square as any work of man's hands, vast 

 fortress-like structures with salients and entering 

 angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time, 

 huge pyramidal piles rising story on story, three 

 thousand feet or more above their foundations, each 

 successive story or superstructure faced by a huge 

 vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that 

 connects it with the story next below. The slopes 

 or taluses represent the softer rock, the vertical 

 walls the harder layers. Usually four or five of these 

 receding stories make up each temple or pyramid. 

 Some of the larger structures show all the strata 

 from the cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the 

 top to the gray Cambrian sandstone at the bottom. 

 From others, such as the Temple of Isis, all the 

 upper formations are gone with a pile of disinte- 

 grated red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on 

 the top where the fragment of the old red wall made 



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