





























364 THE CHASMS OF THE COLORADO. 
they could have paid to the unearthly nature of the seene— 
silence. For three hundred miles the precipitous walls 
from three thousand to six thousand feet in height, am |i 
every side the plain is furrowed by the tributaries, s0 | 
“fissures, so profound the eye cannot.penetrate their gloom 
depths, are separated by walls whose thickness one 
almost span, and slender spires that seem tottering upon 
bases, shoot up thousands of feet from the vaults below. 
The country is impassable to man and beast, and none 
birds can explore the cavernous abysses. The solitu 
unbroken, and the inhospitable rocks deserted, save by @ 
Indians who drag out a wretched and monotonous ©) 
among the subterranean passages. No vegetation ¢ in 
the sides of the cañon or covers the broken surface of 
Mesa; all is alike naked and savage.* ik: 
The chasm at Niagara excites much wonder, but 
shall be said of this? The horizontal strata, answering 
to layer upon either side, are witnesses that cannot ` 

but contorted or bent upward. Had one part settled 
from the other, leaving a gap between, the strata 
be at equal heights. The river is the only agent he 
haye done the mighty work. At some period of p 
incalculably distant, the Colorado and its tributaries ® 
over a mile above on the Mesa, and descended by 3 
into a great lake which filled the valley between the 
and the Black Cafions. A succession of such lak 
nected by cataracts or rapids as before described, | 
the mountain chains, until step by step it reached ihe 
through which it now flows to the Gulf of Califone a 
Newberry found, in the deposits of the lower part asia 
river, the tooth of a mastodon and the silicifed 
Le 
«the Editors of the A™ vid 


3. 
* Plate 8, for which weal indebted to the ki SF a ia 
Journal of Arts and Sciences, gives a view of the general aspect 
other Mesas rising in the distance. i 
