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Show 194 EXPLOH.ATION OF TDE OAN"ONS OF TTIE VOJJORADO. there, and with them spell the words, and read, in a slow and imperfect way, but still so as to understand a little, the story of creation. These rust colored shelves have above them soft shales, of a lemon color, and in ascending the wall we climb them by passing up a steep slope, curiously carved by innumerable rainy-day rills. Above these we find homocreneous limestone a thousand feet in thickness, standing in vertical b cliffs. On top of this great bed we find soft sandstones, so washed away as to leave comparatively flat spaces of solid rock above-a bench on which we can walk on the side of the Grand Cauon, more than four thousand feet above ·the river. In this part of its course the channel is very tortuous. Many streams head in the Kaibab Plateau, to the north, and the Coanini . Plateau, to the south, and run down into the Grand Canon; and these have their lateral canons, and a third and fourth system of side gulches are seen, all having winding ways. Now suppose that we start on th!s bench, where the Grand Canon cuts through the second of the Eastern Kaibab FaultR, and follow it down the canon until we come to the Western Kaibab Fault. We start on the north side of the river, and the Kaibab Plateau is on our right. At once we walk around a great amphitheater, the head of a side gulch, and then another, and another, until we come to a lateral canon coming down the Kaibab, which has its beginning· many miles back. Now we must head this. In doing so we must walk around the brink of a great amphitheater, the head of a side gulch, then another, and still another, until we come to a side canon lateral to the one we are attempting to head, and around it we must go. In doing so, still following the bench on the summit of the limestone, we pass around, in gentle curves, by many of these amphitheaters, and so on we go, everywhere traveling in half circles, which are arranged about side caiions. At last we head the first side canon, and return to the brink of the Grand Canon, at a point only a mile or two to the west of where we started, and so head side canons with side canons all set with amphitheaters, and travel day by day, and must walk hund:·eds of m~les ~o rea~h the_ western edge of the Kaibab Plateau, not more than thirty m1les m a d1rect hne from where we started. So this great bed of rock a thousand feet in thickness, is elaborately carved into a series of amp~1j. theaters. |