So also
do the side canyons and amphitheaters, while secondary gorges and
cirques gradually isolate masses of the promontories, forming new
buildings, all of which are being weathered and pulled and shaken down
while being built, showing destruction and creation as one.
We see
the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest attitudes, wearing
their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off showers of red
and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their leaves, going to
dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with the tongues of
angels the natural beauty of death.
Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
sediments, - sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
with the remains of animals, - and every particle of the sandstones and
limestones of these wonderful structures to be derived from other
landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes,
and other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the
canyon, we discover that an amount of material has been carried off in
the general denudation of the region compared with which even that
carried away in the making of the Grand Canyon is as nothing. Thus
each wonder in sight becomes a window through which other wonders come
to view. In no other part of this continent are the wonders of
geology, the records of the world's auld lang syne, more widely
opened, or displayed in higher piles.
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