of clouds send their white diffuse light into the dark places 
and tone down the intense glare of the direct rays; when they 
roll over the summits in stately procession, wrapping them 
in vapor and revealing cloud- girt masses here and there through 
wide rifts. Then the truth appears and all deceptions are 
exposed. Their real grandeur, their true forms, and a just 
sense of their relations are at last fairly presented, so that 
I 
the mind can grasp them. And they are very grand- -even sub- 
« 
lime. There is no need, as we look upon then, of fancy to 
heighten the picture, nor of metaphor to present it. The 
simple truth is quite enough. I never before had a real- 
izing sense of a cliff 1,800 to 2,000 feet high. I think I 
have a definite and abiding one at present. 
As we moved northward from 8hort Greek, we had frequent 
opportunities to admire these cliffs and buttes, with the 
conviction that they were revealed to us in their real 
magnitudes and in their true relations. They awakened an 
enthusiasm more vivid than we had anticipated, and one which 
the recollection of far grander scenes did not dispel. At 
length the trail descended into a shallow basin where a low 
ledge of sandstones, immediately upon the right, shut them 
out from view; but as we mounted the opposite rim a new scene, 
grander and more beautiful than before, suddenly broke upon 
us. -he ci if i again appeared, presenting the heavy sandstone 
member in a sheer wall nearly a thousand feet high, with a 
steep talus beneath it of eleven or twelve hundred feet more# 
Wide alcoves receded far back into the mass, and in their 
