CHAPTER XIII. 



THE AQUAEIUS PLATEAU. 



Distant views and the approach to the Aquarius. —Its grandeur.— Its summit. — Scenery and vegeta- 

 tion. — Glacial lakes.- The lava cap. — The southern slopes.- Panorama from its southeastern 

 salient.- View to the northeastward.— The Water Pocliet fold.— Inconsequent di-ainage.— View 

 of the Henry Mountains and La Sierra Sal.— The Circle Cliffs.— A laharynth of canons.- Canons 

 of the Escalaute River. — Exposures of the Jura and Trias.— Navajo Mountain. — The great wall of 

 the Kaiparowits Plateau.— Distant view of Table Cliff and Kaiparowits Cliff.— The great southern 

 amphitheater of the Aquarius. — The grand erosion. — Former cxteusion of the Cretaceous and 

 Eocene strata over the Plateau Country.— General structure of the Aquarius. — Faults in the cen- 

 tral portion. — The Escalanto monocliue .and its Pre-Tcrtiary age. — A Cretaceous island. — Western 

 wall of the Aquarius. — Trachytes, audesites, and basalts. — Complicated faulting. — Table Cliff. — 

 Kaiparowits Peak. 



The Aquarius should be described in blank verse and illustrated upon 

 canvas. The explorer who sits upon the brink of its parapet looking off 

 into the southern and eastern haze, who skirts its lava- cap or clambers up 

 and down its vast ravines, who builds his camp-fire by the borders of its 

 snow-fed lakes or stretches himself beneath its giant pines^and spruces, 

 forgets that he is a geologist and feels himself a poet. From numberless 

 lofty standpoints we have seen it afar off, its long, straight crest-line stretched 

 across the sky like the threshold of another world. We have drawn nearer 

 and nearer to it, and seen its mellow blue change day by day to dark som- 

 ber gray, and its dull, expressionless ramparts grow upward into walls of 

 majestic proportions and sublime import. The formless undulations of its 

 slopes have changed to gigantic spurs sweeping slowly down into the 

 painted desert and parted by impenetrable ravines. The mottling of light 

 and shadow upon its middle zones is resolved into groves of Pinus ponde- 

 rosa, and the dark hues at the summit into myriads of spikes, which we 

 know are the storm-loving spruces. 



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