DENVER & RIO GRANDE WESTERN ROUTE. 53 
If the traveler returns from the canyon late in the afternoon he 
may see some of the beauty of the plains as it appeared to her poetic 
imagination : 
Between the pines and the firs are wonderful vistas of the radiant plain. 
Each glimpse is a picture in itself—now an open space of clear sunny distance; 
now a belt of cottonwood trees making a dark-green oasis in the yellow dis- 
tance; now the majestic peau bien still more castle-like, framed in the dark 
foreground lines of pine boug We are in shadow. The sun has wi for et 
but it is yet early afternoon on tne plain and it is brilliant with su 
The brilliance slowly fades, and the lower sunset light casts soft small on 
every mound and hill and hollow. The whole plain seems dimpling with 
against the sky, lines of ae blutfs gleam whe as city walls; close at the 
base om the mountain the foothills seem multiplied and transfigured into count- 
less velvet mounds. The horizon line seems to curve more and more, as if 
= the twilight were — the world up for the night, and we were on 
some outside shore watching i 
MAIN LINE OF RAILROAD FROM COLORADO SPRINGS 
TO CANON CITY. 
On leaving Colorado Springs the Denver & Rio Grande Western 
Railroad follows down the valley of Fountain Creek, which is irri- 
gated and under intensive cultivation. For a number of miles Chey- 
enne Mountain is the most conspicuous object on the west (right), 
and the abruptness with which the mountain ends and the plains 
begin is striking. As explained before, this abrupt junction of plain 
and mountain is due to a great fault, which bounds the mountain 
Cheyenne Mtn. 
DAND daddies 
re) SMiles 
tL 1 i. i eI 
Figure 13 —-Section showing fault at foot of Cheyenne Mountain. 
on the east and brings its hard rocks into contact with the soft, 
flat-lying rocks of the plains. (See fig. 13.) Consequently there are 
no hard sandstones to form foothills, as there are about Manitou and 
many other places along the Front Range. 
The saitoad Soames its southerly course down Fountain Creek, 
and the traveler whose destination is the Pacific coast or some inter- 
mediate point is apparently getting no nearer his destination than 
he was at Denver or Colorado Springs. He may have wondered why 
it is that the Denver & Rio Grande Western, an important link in one 
80697°—22——5 
