With gaps of brightness riven—
How through each pass and hollow streamed
The purpling lights of heaven—
“Rivers of golden-mist flowing down
From far celestial fountains,—
The great sun flaming through the rifts
Beyond the wall of mountains.”
On the right, extended a long line of bluffs, close at hand, sprinkled with cedars between which the brick-red soil showed queerly. The strata in the base of these bluffs were yellowish white and had been cut by water into a series of little knolls and spurs like sand-dunes and equally bare of vegetation. They were hot, desolate, and glaring.
The train ran along the edge of the bottom-lands of which these bluffs were the boundary, and on the left stretched a continuous line of farms watered from the river which was hidden in a distant grove of cottonwoods. That the land was rich was shown not only by the flourishing fields of grain, and of Indian corn, but by the luxuriance of sagebrush and greasewood in the uncultivated spaces. This was the Uncompahgre we were following, and at Delta, where the bottom-lands spread out into a spacious plain, we reached its junction with the Gunnison, and passed to its right bank over a long bridge.
Dominating everything here to the northward is that vast plateau, protected from decay by its roofing of lava over the softer substances that make its bulk, which forms the watershed between the Gunnison and the Grand rivers, and is called the Grand Mesa. We know that its surface is hilly and rough, but from here and everywhere else, its edge, as far as can be seen, cuts the sky with a perfectly straight and even line as though it were as level on top as a table. In color it appears dark crimson above the brown and green of mingled forest and exposed rocks that cover its lower front. Looking past it, up the river, we can see the snowy Elks, and a line of rails is surveyed from Crested Butte right down to this point through a series of cañons. There is little opportunity for farming below the mouth of the Uncompahgre, where abrupt walls of red sandstone shut in the river, and sometimes hem it so closely that a road bed had to be blasted out of the cliff. The river has grown, since we saw it last in the Black cañon, to be a hundred yards wide. It still flows deeply and swiftly, but has lost the cataracts. Its color, too, after so much contact with loose earth, has changed from green to turbid yellow. The run along its banks is straight and swift. Generally the track is laid just at the brink, upon the solid rock, and the river is occasionally crossed upon admirable bridges. One of these bridges, I remember, is at a place where enormous cliffs of carmine-tinted sandstone most curiously worn full of little pits and round holes as though moth-eaten, rise sheer from the water to a great height. The strata of these cliffs—which also have bands of yellow—wear away unequally but always in a rounded shape, so that you can see them edgewise, as at a bend, the protuberances take the form of “volutes;” and this will continue for long distances unchanged, as if the cliff had been adorned with gigantic beads of molding. It is one of the most interesting stages of the whole journey.