THE DIVINE ABYSS 
its labyrinthian channel so far below us. It is worth 
while to make the descent in order to look upon the 
river which has been the chief quarryman in ex- 
cavating the cafion, and to find how inadequate it 
looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from where 
we sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but 
I was assured that it was between two and three 
hundred feet. Water and sand are ever symbols 
of instability and inconstancy, but let them work 
together, and they saw through mountains, and 
undermine the foundations of the hills. 
It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet 
of grandeur, to look up into the placid faces of the 
earth gods and feel their power, and the tourist 
who goes down into the cafion certainly has this 
privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in 
our hats, the glory that had lured us from the top, 
but we seemed to have been nearer its sources, and 
to have brought back a deepened sense of the mag- 
nitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm 
which we had heretofore gazed upon from a distance. 
Also we had plucked the flower of safety from the 
nettle danger, always an exhilarating enterprise. 
In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my 
geologic reading, dwelt frequently and long upon 
the horizon where that cross-bedded Carboniferous 
sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above 
it. How much older the sandstone looked! I could 
not avoid the impression that its surface must have 
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