VIEW TO THE SOUTHWARD. 



209 



country drops down by a succession of terraces formed by lower and lower 

 formations which come to the daylight as those which overlie them are suc- 

 cessively terminated in lines of cliffs, each formation rising gently to 

 the southward to recover a portion of the lost altitude until it is cut 

 off by its own escarpment. Thirty miles away the last descent falls 

 upon the Carboniferous, which slowly rises with an unbroken slope to the 

 brink of the Grand Canon. But the great abyss is not discernible, for the 

 curvature of the earth hides it from sight. Standing among evergreens, 

 knee-deep in succulent grass and a wealth of Alpine blossoms, fanned by 

 chill, moist breezes, we look over terraces decked with towers and tem- 

 ples and gashed with canons to the desert which stretches away beyond 

 the southern horizon, blank, lifeless, and glowing with torrid heat. To the 

 southwestward the Basin Ranges toss up their angry waves in characteristic 

 confusion, sierra behind sierra, till the hazy distance hides them as with a 

 vail. Due south Mount Trumbull is well in view, with its throng of black 

 basaltic cones looking down into the Grand Canon. To the southeast the 

 Kaibab rears its noble palisade and smooth crest line, stretching southward 

 until it dips below the horizon more than a hundred miles away. In the 

 terraces which occupy the middle ground and foreground of the picture 

 we recojjnize the characteristic work of erosion, Numberless masses of rock, 

 carved in the strangest fashion out of the Jurassic and Triassic strata, start 

 up from the terraced platforms. The great cliffs — perhaps the grandest of 

 all the features in this region of grandeur — are turned away from us, and 

 only now and then are seen in profile in the flank of some salient. Among 

 the most marvelous things to be found in these terraces are the canons; 

 such canons as exist nowhere else even in the Plateau Country. Right 

 beneath us are the springs of the Rio Virgin, whose filaments have cut 

 narrow clefts, rather than canons, into the sandstones of the Jura and Trias 

 more than 2,000 feet deep; and as the streamlets sank their narrow beds 

 they oscillated from side to side, so that now bulges of the walls project 

 over the clefts and shut out the sky. They are by far the narrowest 

 chasms, in proportion to their depth, of which I have any knowledge. 



All the Tertiary strata of the Markdgunt, together with the entire 

 Mesozoic series, with the possible exception of the Gray Cliff sandstone, 

 14 n p 



