TIME AND CHANGE 
grand and austere. But I do not think one could 
ever fee] at home in or near the Grand Cafion; it is 
too unlike anything we have ever known upon the 
earth; it is like a vision of some strange colossal 
city uncovered from the depth of geologic time. You 
may have come to it, as we did, from the Petrified 
Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thou- 
sands of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew mil- 
lions of years ago, most of them uncovered, but 
many of them protruding from banks of clay and 
gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of 
the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now 
be gazing upon some petrified antediluvian city of 
temples and holy places exhumed by mysterious 
hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. 
You look into it from above and from another world 
and you descend into it at your peril. Yosemite you 
enter as into a gigantic hall and make your own; the 
cafion you gaze down upon, and are an alien, whether 
you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the 
most majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the 
Grand Cafion is carved out of one of the most beau- 
tiful, but perishable, red Carboniferous sandstone 
and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful and in- 
tricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like 
forms and monumental remains, and noble archi- 
tectural profiles that delight while they bewyilder the 
eye. Yosemite has much greater simplicity, and is 
much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its 
76 
