The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

—THE COLOEADO BASIN. 897the Colorado valley, where the river is older thau the hills through which it hassawn its way-Geographers have divided the great chasm into several secondary gorges,which have been named in descending order Cataract, Narrow, Glen, Marble,and Grand Canon, this last the longest of all (about 220 miles). The northernsection, south of the Kaibab plateau, is altogether unrivalled for the strangegrandeur and wildness of its scenerj'. The bed of the current stands 5,000 andeven 0,000 feet below the edge of its rockj^ walls, which, however, have not retainedtheir vertical position. They have been eaten away to great depths in such away as to form vast lateral cirques separated by bluffs or headlands, which riselike pillars or huge towers, girdled round with stratified rocks, all varying in size,slope, and colour. In this region of the river valley the caiion broadens outupwards, the distance from brink to brink varying from 5 to 12 miles. Theenormous mass of rock now missing between the opposite escarpments has beencompletely swept away by the action of the stream. Nowhere else in the wholeworld can there be seen a river ^•alley exhibiting the phenomena of erosion on agrander scale. The prodigious dimensions of the eroded chasms, the architecturalarrangement of the stratified rocks, " Babels piled on Babels," the sharp sky-lineof the cliils standing out against the azui-e vault above, the brilliant tints of therocks hidden by no patch of verdure, the fantastic forms affected by the colossalsculptures which adorn the imposing sandstone, marble, granite or lava facadesall combine to make up a picture varying with every hour of the daj', with everyturn of the stream, a picture of unrivalled grandeur and diversity of strangeoutlines. On reading their descriptions we begin to understand the expressionsof wonder mingled with awe employed by the geologists engaged in the study ofthe Grand Canon, those especially who have descended to the river bed, lost, asit were, in the bottomless pit while gazing on the gloomy current here and therestill rulflcd b}' reefs and rapids. So early as 1867 the miner "White, pursued byIndians, had embarked with a companion on a raft, and committed himself to theunknown stream. His comrade perished in a whirlpool, but White succeeded insaving his life. Two years later Powell ventured also to embark on the perilousjourney, drifting with the stream from the head to the outlet of the gorge.Twenty years afterwards some engineers repeated the exploit with a view to theconstruction of a railway along the bottom of the caiion. But the first attemptwas unsuccessful. After losing their chief and two boatmen the exploring parlyhad to make their way back across the plateau under great hardships to the pointwhence they had started. A few mouths after their return they again set out,with a fresh equipment of boats especially constructed for this strange voyage,and this time Stanton successfully navigated the river from Grand Junction, thatis, from the coniluence of the Grand and Gunnison Rivers, to the mouth of theColorado, at the head of the Gulf of California.In the stretch of 500 miles in the region of the canons properly so called theriver bed has not a single vertical break like that of Niagara. The total descentof 4,200 feet is dccompusi-d into 520 cataracts, falls or rapids, like those of the