This is Labyrinth cañon, or, as the Indians called it, Toom´-pin wu-neár,—the Land of Standing Rocks. “The stream is still quiet, and we glide along through a strange, wierd, grand region. The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock—cliffs of rock; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere and no vegetation; no soil; no sand. In long gentle curves the river winds about these rocks. When speaking of these we must not conceive of piles of bowlders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and cañon-walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast hollow domes, and tall pinnacles, and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored—buff, gray, red, brown and chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished.”
Below the Labyrinth is Stillwater cañon, forty miles long. Its walls at the lower end are beautifully curved, as the river sweeps in its meandering course. Suddenly gathering swiftness it rushes hastily forward to unite with the current of the Grand. These streams join their floods in solemn depths, more than twelve hundred feet below the general surface of the country. Up the Grand you look into another “labyrinth.” It is the central artery toward which innumerable side-cañons concentrate. In every direction they ramify, deep, dark and impassable to everything but the winged bird. Through such underground passages are sent the waters from the distant highlands, and their confluence fills the whole chasm of the Grand with a turbid stream.
Climb out, laboriously and cautiously, ascend one of the fantastically-formed buttes that rise above the level of the plateau, and what a world of grandeur is spread before the eye! Nothing one can say will give an adequate idea of the singular and surprising landscape,—nothing in art or nature offers a parallel. Below lies the cañon through which the Colorado begins its wonderful course. It can be traced for miles, and occasional glimpses of the river caught. From the northwest comes the Green, in a narrow, winding gorge; from the northeast the Grand, hidden in a cañon that seems bottomless. “Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rock,—not such ledges as you may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains, that, rolled out on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as you may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit.... Away to the east a group of eruptive mountains are seen—the Sierra La Sal. Their slopes are covered with pines, and deep gulches are flanked with great crags, and snow fields are seen near the summits. So the mountains are in uniform—green, gray and silver. Wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges where the rivers are lost below cliffs and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them, mountains blending with the clouds.”
I cannot go on to tell of the profound crevices in the crust of the globe beyond, where the Rio Colorado, taking its name from its vermillioned borders, flows a full mile below the surface. A whole volume like this would not suffice to portray fully the pictures and the teaching of a single day’s ride down that engulfed stream, or an hour’s march along the giddy brink. Only one man, Captain C. E. Dutton, has ever given anything approaching an adequate description. He lived on the plateau and studied it for years; and he tells us that it is a long time before the unaccustomed mind can come to have any real comprehension of the magnitude and the sublimity and the exquisite beauty of what the cañons above and below have to show to the attentive eye. Nothing in the wide world equals or compares with it in its peculiar and amazing beauty and force.
But the fanes and museums of these rock-gods are guarded against the too easy profanation of human curiosity. The terrors of personal discomfort and danger surround them. Enduring and brave must be the horseman or canoeist—what a trip for the Rob Roys of the future!—who penetrates this naked wilderness and feasts his eyes on the riches of novel color and form spread before him in the glory of the setting sun!
The dog watch comes. The gray waste of sterile land sweeps steadily past. The stars wheel slowly along their cosmical paths. Utter loneliness envelopes us as we rush forward with direct and tireless speed. The rolling music of our progress, and the solemnity of our thoughts as we ponder what we have seen and heard, quiet mind and body, the lamps are turned down, the curtains drawn, and silence and darkness reigns in our car, as over the night-beleaguered desert save where some official passes silently through, shading his lantern with his hand.
SALT LAKE CITY.