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Show BY PATH AND TEAIL. 35 with this Barranca, a mental grasp of detail and a per ception of its immensity, you must descend the sides of the granite rock which walls the awful depths. To the man who possesses the gift of appreciation of the ter rific in nature, the prospect is a scene of surpassing splendor. The panorama is never the same, although you think you have examined every peak and escarp ment. As the angle of sunlight changes there begins a ghostly procession of colossal forms from the further side, and the trees around you are silhouetted against the rocks, and the rocks themselves grow in bulk and stature. Down toward the lowlands I saw things, as if alive, raise themselves on the foothills. These are the giant Suaharos, the Candelabrum cacti and beside them was the yucca, a bread tree of the south, whose cream white flowers shone across the snakelike shadows of the strange cacti. The sepulchral quiet of the place, the con scientiousness of the unnumbered ages past since time had hoared those hills and the absence of life and mo tion filled me with sensations of awe and reverence. When darkness shrouds this region and storms of thunder and lightning sweep across it, penetrating the cavernous depths of the great gorge, and revealing the desolation and frightful solitude of the land, it would be a fit abode for the demons of Dante or the Djins of the southern mountains of whom the woods in other days told terrible tales. No man, after his sensations of awe have vanished and his sense of the sublime in nature is satisfied, may continue to gaze upon the scene around him, and yet admit that his mind has done jus tice to the magnificence and glory of this panorama of one of the supremest of earth 9 s wonders. To absorb its |