THE DIVINE ABYSS 
In New Mexico, the cafion habit of the erosion 
forces is still more pronounced. The mountain-lines 
are often as architectural in the distance, or arbi- 
trary, as the sky-line of a city. You may see what 
you half persuade yourself is a huge brick building 
notching the horizon, —an asylum, a seminary, a 
hotel, — but it is only a fragment of red sandstone, 
carved out by wind and rain. 
Presently the high colors of the rocks appear — 
high cliffs with terra-cotta facades, and a new look 
in the texture of the rocks, a soft, beaming, less 
frowning expression, and colored as if by the Western 
sunsets. We are looking upon much younger rocks 
geologically than we see at home, and they have the 
tints and texture of youth. The landscape and 
the mountains look young, because they look un- 
finished, like a house half up. The workmen have 
but just knocked off work to go to dinner; their 
great trenches, their freshly opened quarries, their 
huge dumps, their foundations, their cyclopean 
masonry, their half-finished structures breaking the 
horizon-lines, their square gashes through the moun- 
tains, — all impress the eyes of a traveler from the 
eastern part of the continent, where the earth- 
building and earth-carving forces finished their 
work ages ago. : 
45 
