Into All These Recesses The Level,
Continuous Beds Of Rock In Ledges And Benches, With Their Various
Colors, Run Like Broad Ribbons, Marvelously Beautiful And Effective
Even At A Distance Of Ten Or Twelve Miles.
And the vast space these
glorious walls inclose, instead of being empty, is crowded with
gigantic architectural rock forms gorgeously colored and adorned with
towers and spires like works of art.
Looking down from this level plateau, we are more impressed with a
feeling of being on the top of everything than when looking from the
summit of a mountain. From side to side of the vast gulf, temples,
palaces, towers, and spires come soaring up in thick array half a mile
or nearly a mile above their sunken, hidden bases, some to a level
with our standpoint, but none higher. And in the inspiring morning
light all are so fresh and rosy-looking that they seem new-born; as
if, like the quick-growing crimson snowplants of the California woods,
they had just sprung up, hatched by the warm, brooding, motherly
weather.
In trying to describe the great pines and sequoias of the Sierra, I
have often thought that if one of these trees could be set by itself
in some city park, its grandeur might there be impressively realized;
while in its home forests, where all magnitudes are great, the weary,
satiated traveler sees none of them truly. It is so with these
majestic rock structures.
Though mere residual masses of the plateau, they are dowered with the
grandeur and repose of mountains, together with the finely chiseled
carving and modeling of man's temples and palaces, and often, to a
considerable extent, with their symmetry. Some, closely observed,
look like ruins; but even these stand plumb and true, and show
architectural forms loaded with lines strictly regular and decorative,
and all are arrayed in colors that storms and time seem only to
brighten. They are not placed in regular rows in line with the river,
but "a' through ither," as the Scotch say, in lavish, exuberant
crowds, as if nature in wildest extravagance held her bravest
structures as common as gravel-piles. Yonder stands a spiry cathedral
nearly five thousand feet in height, nobly symmetrical, with sheer
buttressed walls and arched doors and windows, as richly finished and
decorated with sculptures as the great rock temples of India or Egypt.
Beside it rises a huge castle with arched gateway, turrets, watch-towers, ramparts, etc., and to right and left palaces, obelisks, and
pyramids fairly fill the gulf, all colossal and all lavishly painted
and carved. Here and there a flat-topped structure may be seen, or
one imperfectly domed; but the prevailing style is ornate Gothic, with
many hints of Egyptian and Indian.
Throughout this vast extent of wild architecture - nature's own capital
city - there seem to be no ordinary dwellings. All look like grand and
important public structures, except perhaps some of the lower
pyramids, broad-based and sharp-pointed, covered with down-flowing
talus like loosely set tents with hollow, sagging sides. The roofs
often have disintegrated rocks heaped and draggled over them, but in
the main the masonry is firm and laid in regular courses, as if done
by square and rule.
Nevertheless they are ever changing; their tops are now a dome, now a
flat table or a spire, as harder or softer strata are reached in their
slow degradation, while the sides, with all their fine moldings, are
being steadily undermined and eaten away. But no essential change in
style or color is thus effected. From century to century they stand
the same. What seems confusion among the rough earthquake-shaken
crags nearest one comes to order as soon as the main plan of the
various structures appears. Every building, however complicated and
laden with ornamental lines, is at one with itself and every one of
its neighbors, for the same characteristic controlling belts of color
and solid strata extend with wonderful constancy for very great
distances, and pass through and give style to thousands of separate
structures, however their smaller characters may vary.
Of all the various kinds of ornamental work displayed - carving,
tracery on cliff faces, moldings, arches, pinnacles - none is more
admirably effective or charms more than the webs of rain-channeled
taluses. Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of
waste or excess, they cover roofs and dome tops and the base of every
cliff, belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in
beautiful continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and
out around all the intricate system of side canyons, amphitheaters,
cirques, and scallops into which they are sculptured. From one point
hundreds of miles of the fairy embroidery may be traced. It is all so
fine and orderly that it would seem that not only had the clouds and
streams been kept harmoniously busy in the making of it, but that
every raindrop sent like a bullet to a mark had been the subject of a
separate thought, so sure is the outcome of beauty through the stormy
centuries. Surely nowhere else are there illustrations so striking of
the natural beauty of desolation and death, so many of nature's own
mountain buildings wasting in glory of high desert air - going to dust.
See how steadfast in beauty they all are in their going. Look again
and again how the rough, dusty boulders and sand of disintegration
from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty for ashes - as in the flowers
of a prairie after fires - but here the very dust and ashes are
beautiful.
Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once
unbroken plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge
beds of rocks.
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