THE DIVINE ABYSS 
sunk in the plain like a carpenter’s groove into a 
plank. Cloud and sky look the same as at home, 
but the earth is a new earth — new geologically, and 
new in the lines of its landscapes. It seems by the 
forms she develops that Nature must use tools that 
shelong since discarded in the East. She works as if 
with the square and the saw and the compass, and 
uses implements that cut like chisels and moulding- 
planes. Right lines, well-defined angles, and table- 
like tops of buttes and mesas alternate with perfect 
curves, polished domes, carved needles, and fluted 
escarpments. 
In the features of our older landscapes there is 
little or nothing that suggests architectural forms 
or engineering devices; in the Far West one sees 
such forms and devices everywhere. 
In visiting the Petrified Forests in northern Ari- 
zona we stood on the edge of a great rolling plain 
and looked down upon a wide, deeply eroded stretch 
of country below us that suggested a vast army 
encampment, covered as it was with great dome- 
shaped, tent-like mounds of a light terra-cotta color, 
with open spaces like streets or avenues between 
them. There were hundreds or thousands of these 
earthy tents stretching away for twenty-five miles. 
Along the horizon was a gigantic stockade of red, 
rounded pillars, or a solid line of mosque-like temples. 
How unreal, how spectral it all seemed! Not a sound 
or sign of life in the whole painted solitude — a de- 
43 
