198 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
the place where it is upturned and cut by the river between the rail- 
road and the mountain. As seen from the train the country to the 
right of the La Sal Mountains is exceedingly rough and rugged, 
being cut into great canyons with vertical sides or Jeft in giant blocks, 
also with vertical sides. In fact, the traveler is now approaching 
a region in which the expression of the topography is different from 
anything that he has yet seen, unless he is already acquainted with 
the country that was called by Powell the “Canyon lands.” In 
this region Hogarth’s “line of beauty” is unknown. The slopes of 
the hills and mountains do not show gracefully curved lines from 
summits to bases, but each slope forms a straight line and unites 
with its neighbor in an angle and not a curve. The valleys are all 
canyons, which either have vertical sides or sides composed of 
straight lines, and the intervening spurs are mesas with flat tops as 
ufo 
Figure 52.—Angular profiles of the Plateau province. 
\N 
shown in figure 52. A glance at the country on the right of the La 
Sal Mountains will show some of the angularity mentioned. This 
characteristic feature of the land forms is illustrated in Plate 
LXXXITI, A, which is a view taken near Moab. It also shows some 
of the slender towers of rock which the traveler may see from the 
train. 
Although the La Sal Mountains have attracted much attention, 
another group of mountains, which are even more interesting, are 
slowly appearing above the horizon, far to the southwest. Where 
first seen, in the vicinity of Cisco, these mountains, named the Henry 
Mountains for Joseph Henry, the first Secretary of the Smithsonian 
Institution at Washington, are fully 100 miles distant. They are 
divided into three groups—the larger group at the north and two 
isolated peaks farther south.** These mountains lie on the west side 
of Colorado River, which in this region flows in a canyon 1,000 
feet deep. 
“ The study of the Henry Mountains 
in 1876 by G. K. Gilbert led to the dis- 
covery of a new f mountain, 
which is indirectly of volcanic origin 
but is not a voleano. It is now known 
that the La Sal Mountains and many 
other similar groups in the Plateau 
province belong to the same _ class. 
Gilbert found that the peaks of the 
Henry Mountains are composed largely 
of hardened lava, which, when it was 
in a molten state, instead of ascending 
to the surface through some fissure 
in the rocks and then pouring out over 
the surrounding country as a lava 
