BONITA BEND. 55 
the water's edge, are overhanging on either side. The stream is still quiet, 
and we glide along, through a strange, weird, grand region. The landscape 
everywhere, away from the river, is of rock cliffs of rock; tables of rock; 
plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock ten thousand strangely 
carved forms. Rocks everywhere, and no vegetation; no soil; no sand. In 
long, gentle curves, the river windl^about these rocks. 
When speaking of these rocks, we must not conceive of piles of bould 
ers, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant 
forms carved on it: cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands 
of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canon walls that shrink the river 
into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes, and tall pinnacles, and shafts 
set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored buff, gray, red, brown, and 
chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished. 
We pass a place, where two bends of the river come together, an inter 
vening rock having been worn away, and a new channel formed across. 
The old channel ran in a great circle around to the light, by what was once 
a circular peninsula; then an island; then the water left the old channel 
entirely, and passed through the cut, and the old bed of the river is dry. So 
the great circular rock stands by itself, with precipitous walls all about it, 
and we find but one place where it can be scaled. Looking from its sum 
mit, a long stretch of river is seen, sweeping close to the overhanging cliffs 
on the right, but having a little meadow between it and the wall on the left. 
The curve is very gentle and regular. We name this Bonita Bend. 
And just here we climb out once more, to take another bearing on The 
Butte of the Cross. Reaching an eminence, from which we can overlook 
the landscape, we are surprised to find that our butte, with its wonderful 
form, is indeed two buttes, one so standing in front of the other that, from 
our last point of view, it gave the appearance of a cross. 
Again, a few miles below Bonita Bend, we go out a mile or two along 
the rocks, toward the Orange Cliffs, passing over terraces paved with jasper. 
The cliffs are not far away, and we soon reach them, and wander in 
some deep, painted alcoves, which attracted our attention from the river ; 
then we return to our boats. 
Late in the afternoon, the water becomes swift, and our boats make 
