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Show CHAPTER XIII. THE AQUAEIUS PLATEAU. Distant views and the approach to the Aquarius.â€"Its grandeur.â€"Its summit.â€"Scenery and vegetation.â€"Glacial lakes.â€"The lava cap.â€"The southern slopes.â€"Panorama from its southeastern salient.â€"View to the northeastward.â€"The Water Pocket fold.â€"Inconsequent drainage.â€"View of the Henry Mountains and La Sierra Sal.â€"The Circle Cliffs.â€"A labarynth of canons.â€"Caiious of the Escalante River.â€"Exposures of the Jura and Trias.â€"Navajo Mountain.â€"The great wall of the Kaiparowits Plateau.â€"Distant view of Table Cliff and Kaiparowits Cliff.â€"The great southern amphitheater of the Aquarius.â€"The grand erosion.â€"Former extension of the Cretaceous and Eocene strata over the Plateau Country.â€"General structure of the Aquarius.â€"Faults in the central portion.â€"The Escalante monocline and its Pre-Tertiary age.â€"A Cretaceous island.â€"Western wall of the Aquarius.â€"Trachytes, andesites, and basalts.â€"Complicated faulting.â€"Table Cliff.â€" Kaiparowits Peak. The Aquarius should be described in blank verse and illustrated upon canvas. The explorer who sits upon the brink of its parapet looking off into the southern and eastern haze, who skirts its lava-cap or clambers up and down its vast ravines, who builds his camp-fire by the borders of its snow-fed lakes or stretches himself beneath its giant pines and spruces, forgets that he is a geologist and feels himself a poet. From numberless lofty standpoints we have seen it afar off, its long, straight crest-line stretched across the sky like the threshold of another world. We have drawn nearer and nearer to it, and seen its mellow blue change day by day to dark somber gray, and its dull, expressionless ramparts grow upward into walls of majestic proportions and sublime import. The formless undulations of its slopes have changed to gigantic spurs sweeping slowly down into the painted desert and parted by impenetrable ravines. The mottling of light and shadow upon its middle zones is resolved into groves of Pinus ponde-rosa, and the dark hues at the summit into myriads of spikes, which we know are the storm-loving spruces. 284 |
