TIME AND CHANGE 
doors. All the profound, formative, world-shaping 
forces of nature go on in a realm that we can reach 
only through our imaginations. They so far tran- 
scend our human experiences that it requires an act 
of faith to apprehend them. The repose of the hills 
and the mountains, how profound! yet they may be 
rising or sinking before our very eyes, and we detect 
no sign. Only on exceptional occasions, during earth- 
quakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless 
slumber rudely disturbed. 
Geologists tell us that from the great plateau in 
which the Grand Cafion is cut, layers of rock many 
thousands of feet thick were cut away before the 
cafion was begun. 
Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going 
south toward the cafion, we descend a grand geo- 
logic stairway, every shelf or tread of which consists 
of different formations fifty or more miles broad, 
from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand 
feet at the start, across the Cretaceous, the Juras- 
sic, the Triassic, the Permian, to the Carboniferous, 
which is the bottom or landing of the Grand Cafion 
plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet. 
Each step terminates more or less abruptly, the first 
by a drop of eight hundred feet, ornamented by 
rows of square obelisks and pilasters of uniform pat- 
tern and dimension, “giving the effect,” says Major 
Dutton, “of a gigantic colonnade from which the 
entablature has been removed or has fallen in ruins.” 
60 
