He seemed to himself to be traversing the abodes of the Genii.  Although he had only heard of “Vathek,” he thought of the Hall of Eblis.  It was such an abyss as no artist has ever hinted, excepting Dore in his picturings of Dante’s “Inferno.”  Could Dante himself have looked into it, he would have peopled it with the most hopeless of his lost spirits.  The shadow, the aridity, the barrenness, the solemnity, the pitilessness, the horrid cruelty of the scene, were more than might be received into the soul.  It was something which could not be imagined, and which when seen could not be fully remembered.  To gaze on it was like beholding the mysterious, wicked countenance of the father of all evil.  It was a landscape which was a fiend.

The precipices were not bare and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor finish and of color.  They had their horrible decorations; they showed the ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them; they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their magnitude.  It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell.  Layers of brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect which was prodigious:  a hundred feet in height and miles in length at a stroke of the brush.

The architectural and sculptural results were equally monstrous.  There were lateral shelves twenty feet in width, and thousands of yards in length.  There were towers, pilasters, and formless caryatides, a quarter of a mile in height.  Great bulks projected, capped by gigantic mitres or diadems, and flanked by cavernous indentations.  In consequence of the varying solidity of the stone, the river had wrought the precipices into a series of innumerable monuments, more or less enormous, commemorative of combats.  There had been interminable strife here between the demons of earth and the demons of water, and each side had set up its trophies.  It was the Vatican and the Catacombs of the Genii; it was the museum and the mausoleum of the forces of nature.

At various points tributary gorges, the graves of fluvial gods who had perished long ago, opened into the main canon.  In passing these the voyagers had momentary glimpses of sublimities and horrors which seemed like the handiwork of that “anarch old,” who wrought before the shaping of the universe.  One of these sarcophagi was a narrow cleft, not more than eighty feet broad, cut from surface to base of a bed of sandstone one-third of a mile in depth.  It was inhabited by an eternal gloom which was like the shadow of the blackness of darkness.  The stillness, the absence of all life whether animal or vegetable, the dungeon-like closeness of the monstrous walls, were beyond language.