Masseth took a few steps onward.
"You noticed," he said, "how gradual that slope was. Now," pausing as they crossed the ridge, "this is not so gradual." He smiled at the boy's speechless wonderment.
Roger found himself standing not three yards away from a drop of 6,800 feet, the first couple of thousand sheer almost immediately below him. So near that he could have leaped to it, rose a fantastic pinnacle, elaborately carved, springing from a base 1,200 feet below. Beyond this, seamed and jagged, thrown across this cloven chasm as though in defiance of any natural supposing, flung a blood-red escarpment, taking the breath away by the very audacity of its reckless scenic emphasis. Further, again, in unsoftened splashes and belts of naked color, mesa and plateau, peak and crag, shouldering butte and towering barrier, through a vista of miles seeming to stretch to the very world's end, impelled a breathless awe.
And, in Titanic mockery of pygmy human work, the glowing rocks appeared grotesquely, yet powerfully scornful of the greatest buildings of mankind. Minaret and spire, minster and dome, façade and campanile, stood guard over the riven precipices, and not to be outdone by man, nature had there erected temple and coliseum, pyramid and vast cathedral, castle and thrice-walled fastness, until it seemed to the boy that there was thrown before his eyes a hysterical riot of every dream and nightmare of architecture that the world had ever conceived.
"But—but, I never thought it was anything like this!" exclaimed Roger.
The older man repressed a smile at the triteness of the speech, which is that usually educed from every new beholder of the scene.
"What do you think of it?" he said.
"It doesn't seem real," answered the boy. "It's like the places you see in your dreams that you know can't be so, and what's more, it's like one of those places all set on fire with flames of different colors."
