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Show 28 BY PATH AND TRAIL. this untenanted wilderness, unexpected examples of the builder's art. In this tumultuous land, lonely and forbid ding rose " cloud capped towers and gorgeous palaces, M vast rotundas, cathedral spires and rocks of shapeless forms. Between me and the valley which bloomed with tropi cal life far down by the flowing waters, lay a lava lake, where tumbling waves of fire in Miocene times were frozen into frigidity, as if God had said, " Here let the billows stiffen and have a rest." Over this desolate plain of black, igneous matter, in a sky of opalescent clearness, two eagles, playmates of the mountain storm, were crossing and apparently making for the pine lands of Iquala, whose lofty peak is suffused with roseate blush long before the mists and darkness are out of the Val ley. Sometime in the palasozoic age, in the days when God said, " Let the waves that are under the heaven be gathered together into one place and let the day and land appear,' 7 these great mountains were heaved up, invading the region of the clouds. And the clouds re sented the intrusion, and at once began an attack on the adamantine fortifications. In this war of the elements the clouds must " win out," for before the morning of eternity the clouds will have pulverized the mountains into dust. These wandering, tempest- bearing clouds, with restless energy, are ever hurling their allied forces of wind and rain against the fronts and flanks of their enemies and, with marvelous cunning, are gnawing away their porphyritic strength, cutting deep gashes in their sides, separating individual bodies and fashioning them into towering masses of isolated and architecturally won derful formations. The torrential rains and melting snows have rushed |