and suggestions, and its opulence of color effects—­a chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty miles wide, in which Niagara would be only as a picture upon your walls, in which the Pyramids, seen from the rim, would appear only like large tents, in which the largest building upon the earth would dwindle to insignificant proportions.  There are amphitheatres and mighty aisles eight miles long and three or four miles wide and three or four thousand feet deep.  There are room-like spaces eight hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves with openings a mile wide; there are niches six hundred feet high overhung by arched lintels; there are pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to two hundred feet high.  Here I am running at once into allusions to the architectural features and suggestions of the canon, which must play a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it.  There are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; there is the semblance of balustrades on the summit of a noble facade.  In one of the immense halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines of three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, and behind and above them the suggestion of three more chairs in partial ruin.  Indeed, there is such an opulence of architectural forms in this divine abyss as one has never before dreamed of seeing wrought by the blind forces of nature.  These forces have here foreshadowed all the noblest architecture of the world.  Many of the vast carved and ornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly named temples, as Shiva’s Temple, a mile high, carved out of the red Carboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines.  Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops.  Farther to the east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster, and the Tomb of Odin.  Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions of temples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work of human hands can rival.  “The grandest objects,” says Major Dutton, “are merged in a congregation of others equally grand.”  With the wealth of form goes a wealth of color.  Never, I venture to say, were reds and browns and grays and vermilions more appealing to the eye than they are as they softly glow in this great canyon.  The color-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue of the gneiss at the bottom, up through the yellowish brown of the Cambrian layers, and on up through seven or eight broad bands of varying tints of red and vermilion, to the broad yellowish-gray at the top.

III

The north side of the canyon has been much more deeply and elaborately carved than the south side; most of the great architectural features are on the north side—­the huge temples and fortresses and amphitheatres.  The strata dip very gently to the north and northeast, while the slope of the surface is to the south and southeast.  This has caused the drainage from the great northern plateaus to flow into the canyon and thus cut and carve the north side as we behold it.