THE DIVINE ABYSS 



its last stand. In those masses, which are still 

 crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how 

 surely the process of disintegration is going on by 

 the fragments and debris of light gray rock, like the 

 chips of giant workmen, that strew the deeper- 

 colored slopes below them. These fragments fade 

 out as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had 

 melted like bits of ice. Indeed, the melting of ice 

 and the dissolution of a rock do not differ much ex- 

 cept that one is very rapid and the other infinitely 

 slow. In time (not man's time, but the Lord's 

 time), all these light masses that cap the huge tem- 

 ples will be weathered away, yea, and all the vast 

 red layers beneath them, and the huge structures 

 will be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado 

 River will carry their ashes to the sea, and where 

 they once stood will be seen gray, desert-like pla- 

 teaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons 

 from which the flesh has been removed — sharp, 

 angular, obtrusive, but bound together as by liga- 

 ments of granite. The tooth of time gnaws at them 

 day and night and has been gnawing for thousands 

 of centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps 

 remain. From the Temple of Isis and the Tomb of 

 Odin the two or three upper stories are gone. 



On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple 

 of Isis, about twenty-five hundred feet high. The 

 first story is about a thousand feet; the second, three 

 hundred and fifty feet; the third, one hundred and 



53 



