208 GUJDEBOOK 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 st-feams have cut into them 

 deep canvons, ha ving -nearly or quite vertical sides, which measure 

 hundreds or perhaps a thousand feet in height. The profiles are all 

 angular ; they are comjDosed 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 sutfusing 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 fi^om 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 i^oints 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 



