cones are of red cinder, while sometimes the lava is piled up into huge mountains which are covered with forest. To the west of the Uinkaret Mountains spreads the great Shiwits Plateau, crowned by Mount Dellenbough.

Past the south end of these plateaus runs the Colorado River; southward through Marble Canyon and in the Grand Canyon, then northwestward past the Kaibab and Shinumo Canyon, then southwestward past the Kanab Plateau, Uinkaret Mountains to the southernmost point of the Shiwits Plateau, and then northwestward to the Grand Wash Cliffs. Its distance in this course is little more than 300 miles—but the 300 miles of river are set on every side with cliffs, buttes, towers, pinnacles, amphitheaters, caves, and terraces, exquisitely storm-carved and painted in an endless variety of colors.

The plateau to the south of the Grand Canyon, which we need not describe in parts, is largely covered with a gigantic forest. There are many volcanic mountains and many treeless valleys. In the high forest there are beautiful glades with little stretches of meadow which are spread in summer with a parterre of flowers of many colors. This upper region is the garden of the world. When I was first there bear, deer, antelope, and wild turkeys abounded, but now they are becoming scarce. Widely scattered throughout the plateau are small canyons, each one a few miles in length and a few hundred feet in depth. Throughout their course cliff-dweller ruins are found. In the highland glades and along the valley, pueblo ruins are widely scattered, but the strangest sights of all the things due to prehistoric man are the cave dwellings that are dug in the tops of cinder cones and the villages that were built in the caves of volcanic cliffs. If now I have succeeded in creating a picture of the plateau I will attempt a brief description of the canyon.

Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody. Bissell Point and Colorado River.

Marble Canyon

Above the Paria the great river runs down a canyon which it has cut through one plateau. On its way it flows with comparative quiet through beautiful scenery, with glens that are vast amphitheaters which often overhang great springs and ponds of water deeply embosomed in the cliffs. From the southern escarpment of this plateau the great Colorado Plateau rises by a comparatively gentle acclivity, and Marble Canyon starts with walls but a few score feet in height until they reach an altitude of about 5,000 feet. On the way the channel is cut into beds of rock of lower geologic horizon, or greater geologic age. These rocks are sandstones and limestones. Some beds are very hard, others are soft and friable. The friable rocks wash out and the harder rocks remain projecting from the walls, so that every wall presents a set of stony shelves. These shelves rise along the wall toward the south as new shelves set in from below.

In addition to this shelving structure the walls are terraced and the cliffs of the canyon are set back one upon the other. Then these canyon walls are interrupted by side streams which themselves have carved lateral canyons, some small, others large, but all deep. In these side gorges the scenery is varied and picturesque; deep clefts are seen here and there as you descend the river—clefts furnished with little streams along which mosses and other plants grow. At low water the floor of the great canyon is more or less exposed, and where it flows over limestone rocks beautiful marbles are seen in many colors; saffron, pink, and blue prevail. Sometimes a façade or wall appears rising vertically from the water for thousands of feet. At last the canyon abruptly ends in a confusion of hills beyond which rise towering cliffs, and the group of hills are nestled in the bottom of a valley-like region which is surrounded by cliffs more than a mile in altitude.

The Grand Canyon

From here on for many miles the whole character of the canyon changes. First a dike appears; this is a wall of black basalt crossing the river; it is of lava thrust up from below through a huge crevice broken in the rock by earthquake agency. On the east the Little Colorado comes; here it is a river of salt water, and it derives its salt a few miles up the stream. The main Colorado flows along the eastern and southern wall. Climbing this for a few hundred feet you may look off toward the northwest and gaze at the cliffs of the Kaibab Plateau.

This is the point where we built a trail down a side canyon where Mr. Walcott was to make his winter residence and study of the region; it is very complicated and exhibits a vast series of unconformable rocks of high antiquity. These lower rocks are of many colors; in large part they are shales. The region, which appears to be composed of bright-colored hills washed naked by the rain, is, in fact, beset with a multitude of winding canyons with their own precipitous walls. It is a region of many canyons in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself.

In this beautiful region Mr. Walcott, reading the book of geology, lived in a summerland during all of a long winter while the cliffs above were covered with snow which prevented his egress to the world. His companions, three young Mormons, longing for a higher degree of civilization, gazed wistfully at the snow-clad barriers by which they were inclosed. One was a draughtsman, another a herder of his stock, and the third his cook. They afterward told me that it was a long winter of homesickness, and that months dragged away as years, but Mr. Walcott himself had the great book of geology to read, and to him it was a winter of delight.

A half dozen miles below the basaltic wall the river enters a channel carved in 800 or 1,000 feet of dark gneiss of very hard rock. Here the channel is narrow and very swift and beset with rapids and falls. On the south and southwest the wall rises abruptly from the water to the summit of the plateau for about 6,000 feet, but across the river on the north and west mountains of gneiss and quartzites appear, sometimes rising to the height of a thousand feet. These are mountains in the bottom of a canyon. The buttes and plateaus of the inter-canyon region are composed of shales, sandstones, and limestones, which give rise to vast architectural shelving and to pinnacles and towers of gigantic proportions, the whole embossed with a marvelously minute system of fretwork carved by the artistic clouds. Looking beyond these mountains, buttes, and plateaus vistas of the walls of the great plateau are seen. From these walls project salients, and deep re-entrant angles appear.

The whole scene is forever reminding you of mighty architectural pinnacles and towers and balustrades and arches and columns with lattice work and delicate carving. All of these architectural features are sublime by titanic painting in varied hues—pink, red, brown, lavender, gray, blue, and black. In some lights the saffron prevails, in other lights vermilion, and yet in other lights the grays and blacks predominate. At times, and perhaps in rare seasons, clouds and cloudlets form in the canyon below and wander among the side canyons and float higher and higher until they are dissolved in the upper air, or perhaps they accumulate to hide great portions of the landscape. Then through rifts in the clouds vistas of Wonderland are seen. Such is that portion of the canyon around the great south bend of the Colorado River past the point of the Kaibab Plateau.

As Seen by the Geologist

In the last chapter of my book entitled “The Canyons of the Colorado” I have described the Grand Canyon in the following terms:

The Grand Canyon is a gorge 217 miles in