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THE CHASMS OF THE COLORADO. 363 
side of the river. The unavoidable inference from these facts 
is that the mountain ranges, of which there are several be- 
sides those I have mentioned, once crossed the bed of the river 
and dammed back its flow, filling the valleys between with 
extensive lakes. These were probably connected by a series 
of eascades and rapids, which must have been of unparalleled 
beauty and grandeur; but as Niagara is destroying itself, so 
have they destroyed themselves. The stupendous precipices, 
so graphically described by Lieutenant Ives, are the trophies 
of their unconquerable power, the remnants of those moun- 
tain barriers through which the cataracts ate their way and 
drained the great lakes of the interior. 
These chasms, however, with their thousand feet or so of 
granite and solid porphyries, are but the outer gates pre-- 
paring the mind for the awful sublimity of the Great Canon. 
The local disturbances or oscillations which gave rise to the 
wild scenery of the lowlands, tossing their originally hori- 
zontal layers into lofty mountainous waves, have made no 
impression upon its walls. The level courses of sandstone, 
limestone, and shale, lie upon a bed of granite, of itself a 
thousand feet thick, without a bend or fault to mar their 
perfect parallelism. The entire thickness of the first great 
Mesa or plateau, west of the Rocky Mountains, is exposed 
in the cliffs, and the edges of the severed plain hang in the 
preven a mile above the river. ; 
“The scenery,” says Lieutenant Ives, speaking of a side 
“tion down which they passed some seventeen miles to the 
"iver, “much resembled that in the Black Cañon, excepting 
an the rapid descent, the increasing magnitude of the colos- 
piles that blocked the end of the vista, and the corre- 
iog depth and gloom of the gaping chasms into which 
aan plunging, imparted an unearthly character to a way 
i ch might have resembled the portals of the infernal re- 
sions.” No attempt is made to describe the Great Canon 
. = -= explorers seem to have succumbed to the awe 
E “ited in their own minds, and yielded the greatest homage 

