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Show CHAPTEE IV. VALLEY OF THE CHURCHES. The greatest of American scenic painters, Thomas Moran, roamed for three months through the Grand Canyon of Arizona, making sketches of the strange for mations, catching, as best he could, the play of light and shade and the glory of the sunsets when the heavens were bathed in chromatic light. He went home and fin ished his famous painting, " The Grand Canyon of the Colorado Biver." His canvas was hung in the capital at Washington the highest recognition of his genius his country could confer upon him yet Moran proclaimed that it was impossible for man to paint the splendor of the canyon when the heavens, at times, are turned to blood. I have already mentioned that the porphyritic moun tains still bear the marks of elemental wars, of gaping wounds opened in the Titanic combats of past days. These are the deep ravines, the narrow fissures and strange openings left when the mountains were wedged asunder, or when torrential storms broke upon the great hills and, forming into rivers, tore their way to the low lands. In those remote times, gases of enormous power of expansion were imprisoned in the wombs of these moun tains, then air and water entered, the gases became com-bustibile* and were converted into actual flames, till the rocks melted and the metals changed to vapors and the vapors liquefied and, expanding in their fierce wrath, |