208 GUIDEBOOK OF THE WESTERN UNITED STATES. 
have been left standing as great tables tilted to the east at an angle of 
30° or 40°, which as seen from the train resemble the teeth of a gigan- 
tic saw. This line of tilted sandstone can be followed by the eye for 
many miles, but in the distance it fades into the misty blue of the 
desert. The beds nearer the traveler are upturned less steeply and 
have not been removed by erosion, so they form a great swell, but 
even where the rocks lie nearly flat the streams have cut into them 
deep canyons, having nearly or quite vertical sides, which measure 
hundreds or perhaps a thousand feet in height. The profiles are all 
angular; they are composed of straight lines; and when viewed from 
a distance these immense pinnacles of rock resemble the ruins of 
some ancient city, and in imagination one can see in them the remains 
of temples, pyramids, columns, and arches standing in grandeur amid 
the wreck of the structures of which they once formed a part. Here 
one can not resist the temptation to let the imagination have free 
rein—to rebuild these ruins as wonderful habitations of ancient 
giants and to picture the dramas that may have been enacted in 
them. If the traveler is fortunate enough to see these ruins when the 
sun is just setting behind their massive piles and suffusing their 
domes and pinnacles with great golden halos he can readily under- 
stand how a savage race might have here received the inspiration to 
build a magnificent temple to the sun, which to our minds might 
rival the most wonderful temples of the Egyptian kings. 
At the point where the railroad makes the turn around the Beck- 
with Plateau it is at a considerable distance from the front of the 
plateau, but farther north it approaches the front more and more 
closely, until near the siding called Desert it is so close that the 
traveler may see, if the light is just right, all the delicate lines of 
erosion that the rain has cut in the shale slope. 
The great anticline called the San Rafael Swell extends far to 
the north, and the rocks of the Book Cliffs bear the same relation 
to those in the anticline as the rocks of the Book Cliffs at Grand 
Junction bear to those of the Uncompahgre Plateau. The Book 
Cliffs west of Green River look different from those with which the 
traveler is familiar east of it. East of Green River the rocks weather 
into many projecting points or salients of hard rock, and between 
these points there are deep notches or reentrant angles. In addition, 
the upper beds of sandstone have weathered back much farther than 
the lower beds, but each layer is characterized by the same kind of 
salients and reentrant angles. The result of this form of weathering 
is a front that is extremely irregular and jagged. West of Green 
River the front of the Book Cliffs is very regular; it shows no 
tendency to weather into long points. This difference is probably due 
ar a Re 
