THE DIVINE ABYSS 
its last stand. In those masses, which are still 
crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how 
surely the process of disintegration is going on by 
the fragments and débris of light gray rock, like the 
chips of giant workmen, that strew the deeper- 
colored slopes below them. These fragments fade 
out as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had 
melted like bits of ice. Indeed, the melting of ice 
and the dissolution of a rock do not differ much ex- 
cept that one is very rapid and the other infinitely 
slow. In time (not man’s time, but the Lord’s 
time), all these light masses that cap the huge tem- 
ples will be weathered away, yea, and all the vast 
red layers beneath them, and the huge structures 
will be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado 
River will carry their ashes to the sea, and where 
they once stood will be seen gray, desert-like pla- 
teaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons 
from which the flesh has been removed — sharp, 
angular, obtrusive, but bound together as by liga- 
ments of granite. The tooth of time gnaws at them 
day and night and has been gnawing for thousands 
of centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps 
remain. From the Temple of Isis and the Tomb of 
Odin the two or three upper stories are gone. 
On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple 
of Isis, about twenty-five hundred feet high. The 
first story is about a thousand feet; the second, three 
hundred and fifty feet; the third, one hundred and 
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