14 
THE GEAND CASTON DISTRICT. 
East of this plateau the surface drops quickly across the great mono- 
cline, nearly 4,000 feet, upon the region draining into the Marble Cafion. 
This region is divisible into two parts, a northern and a southern. The 
former, named the Paria Plateau, is a terrace of Triassic strata, scored 
with a labyrinth of canons, but otherwise featureless so far as its summit is 
concerned. It terminates abruptly towards the south by a line of cliffs, 
describing a semicircle convex southward. They are an extension of the 
Vermilion Cliffs, and their position, projecting far in advance of the main 
line, is very instructive when viewed in connection with the grand erosion 
of this part of the Plateau Province. Their profiles drop upon a lower 
platform which extends far to the southward, hot, dreary, and barren, to 
an extreme degree. Diagonally across this lower platform lies the course of 
the Marble Canon, which in depth and grandeur is surpassed only by the 
Grand Canon. 
Still eastward, and more to the northward, is another large plateau, the 
Kaiparowits, nearly equal to the Kaibab, both in area and altitude. It 
reaches out from the southern cape of the Aquarius, extending to the Glen 
Canon of the Colorado. It is composed of lower and middle Cretaceous 
beds, and if the chasm cut by the river were filled up again the plateau 
would spread out on the southern side into an indefinite expanse of Cre- 
taceous strata, which form the great mesas of that region. Its surface is 
scored with a plexus of canons which are interesting as the relics of an 
erosion which is believed to have occurred in late Meocene or early Plio- 
cene time. 
Thus far the description has been confined to regions lying north of 
the Colorado. Upon the southern side is an expanse of plateau land 
equally extensive. Those well marked boundaries winch subdivide the 
district north of the Grand Canon into individual plateaus do not appear 
upon the southern side, or else appear in such changed relations that they 
cannot serve the same purpose. The country which drains from the south 
into the canon really has no subdivisions, but is a single indivisible expanse 
to which the name of Colorado Plateau has been given. Its strata are 
very nearly horizontal, and with the exception of Cataract Canon and some 
of its ti’ibutaries it is not deeply scored. Low mesas gently rolling and 
