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Show VIEW TO THE SOUTHWAKD. 209 country drops down by a succession of terraces formed by lower and lower formations which come to the daylight as those which overlie them are successively terminated in lines of cliffs, each formation rising gently to the southward to recover a portion of the lost altitude until it is cut off by its own escarpment. Thirty miles away the last descent falls upon the Carboniferous, which slowly rises with an unbroken slope to the brink of the Grand Canon. But the great abyss is not discernible, for the curvature of the earth hides it from sight. Standing among evergreens, knee-deep in succulent grass and a wealth of Alpine blossoms, fanned by chill, moist breezes, we look over terraces decked with towers and temples and gashed with canons to the desert which stretches away beyond the southern horizon, blank, lifeless, and glowing with torrid heat. To the southwestward the Basin Ranges toss up their angry waves in characteristic confusion, sierra behind sierra, till the hazy distance hides them as with a vail. Due south Mount Trumbull is well in view, with its throng of black basaltic cones looking dowm into the Grand Canon. To the southeast the Kaibab rears its noble palisade and smooth crest line, stretching southward until it dips below the horizon more than a hundred miles away. In the terraces which occupy the middle ground and foreground of the picture we recognize the characteristic work of erosion, Numberless masses of rock, carved in the strangest fashion out of the Jurassic and Triassic strata, start up from the terraced platforms. The great cliffs-perhaps the grandest of all the features in this region of grandeur-are turned away from us, and only now and then are seen in profile in the flank of some salient. Among the most marvelous things to be found in these terraces are the canons; such canons as exist nowhere else even in the Plateau Country. Right beneath us are the springs of the Rio Virgin, whose filaments have cut narrow clefts, rather than canons, into the sandstones of the Jura and Trias more than 2,000 feet deep; and as the streamlets sank their narrow beds they oscillated from side to side, so that now bulges of the walls project over the clefts and shut out the sky. They are by far the narrowest chasms, in proportion to their depth, of which I have any knowledge. All the Tertiary strata of the Markagunt, together with the entire Mesozoic series, with the possible exception of the Gray Cliff sandstone, 14 H P |