8(3 
THE GlfANI) CASfON I)IST1U(;T. 
from their vents, flooding many a square mile of mesa land, and in the 
wide alcoves they have reached the brink of the wall and cascaded over it. 
Still pouring down the long taluses they have reached the valley bottom 
below and spread out in wide fields, disappearing underneath the clayey 
alluvium, which has buried much of their lower portions. The appearance 
of these old lava cascades, a mile or more wdde, a thousand feet high, and 
black as Erebus, is striking in the extreme. There are five of these basaltic 
cataracts, each consisting of many individual coulees. Between them the 
bold pediments of brightly-colored Carboniferous strata jut out into the 
valley. 
At length we approach the lower end of the Toroweap. The scenery 
here becomes colossal. Its magnitude is by no means its most impressive 
feature, but precision of the forms. The dominant idea ever before the 
mind is the architecture displayed in the profiles. It is hard to realize that 
this is the work of the blind forces of nature. We feel like mere insects crawl- 
ing along the street of a city flanked with immense temples, or as Lemuel 
Gulliver might have felt in revisiting the capital of Brobdingnag, and find- 
ing it deserted. At the foot of the valley the western wall is nearly 1,500 
feet high, the eastern about 2,000, and the interval sej^arating them is about 
three miles. Suddenly they turn at right angles to right and left, and 
become the upper wall of the Grand Canon of the Colorado. The Toro- 
weap now opens into the main passageway of the great chasm. The view, 
however, is much obstructed. At the foot of the eastern gable is a medley 
of rocky ledges of red sandstone, while around the base of the western 
gable are large masses of basalt reaching more than half-way across the 
valley. In front rises a crater, which is about 600 feet high, seemingly a 
mere knoll in the midst of this colossal scenery. Beyond it, and five miles 
distant, rises the palisade which forms the southern upper wall of the chasm, 
stretching athwart the line of vision interminably in either direction. Its 
altitude is apparently the same as that of the palisade above us, and its 
profile is also identical. Climbing among the rocky ledges which lie at the 
base of the escarpment, we at length obtain a stand-point which enables 
us to gain a preliminary view of the mighty avenue To the eastward it 
stretches in vanishing perspective forty miles or more. Between symmetric 
