SIVA'S TEMPLE.
It is difficult to realize the magnitude of these objects, so deceptive are distances and dimensions in the transparent atmosphere of Arizona. Siva's Temple, for example, stands upon a platform four or five miles square, from which rise domes and pinnacles a thousand feet in height. Some of their summits call to mind immense sarcophagi of jasper or of porphyry, as if they were the burial-places of dead deities, and the Grand Cañon a Necropolis for pagan gods. Yet, though the greater part of the population of the world could be assembled here, one sees no worshipers, save an occasional devotee of Nature, standing on the Cañon's rim, lost in astonishment and hushed in awe. These temples were, however, never intended for a human priesthood. A man beside them is a pygmy. His voice here would be little more effective than the chirping of an insect. The God-appointed celebrant, in the cathedrals of this Cañon, must be Nature. Her voice alone can rouse the echoes of these mountains into deafening peals of thunder. Her metaphors are drawn from an experience of ages. Her prayers are silent, rapturous communings with the Infinite. Her hymns of praise are the glad songs of birds; her requiems are the meanings of the pines; her symphonies the solemn roaring of the winds. "Sermons in stone" abound at every turn; and if, as the poet has affirmed, "An undevout astronomer is mad," with still more truth can it be said that those are blind who in this wonderful environment look not "through Nature up to Nature's God." These wrecks of Tempest and of Time are finger-posts that point the thoughts of mortals to eternal heights; and we find cause for hope in the fact that, even in a place like this, Man is superior to Nature; for he interprets it, he finds in it the thoughts of God, and reads them after Him.
NEAR THE TEMPLE OF SET.
HANCE'S TRAIL, LOOKING UP.
The coloring of the Grand Cañon is no less extraordinary than its forms. Nature has saved this chasm from being a terrific scene of desolation by glorifying all that it contains. Wall after wall, turret after turret, and mountain range after mountain range belted with tinted strata, succeed one another here like billows petrified in glowing colors. These hues are not as brilliant and astonishing in their variety as are the colors of the Yellowstone Cañon, but their subdued and sombre tones are perfectly suited to the awe-inspiring place which they adorn. The prominent tints are yellow, red, maroon, and a dull purple, as if the glory of unnumbered sunsets, fading from these rugged cliffs, had been in part imprisoned here. Yet, somehow, specimens of these colored rocks lose all their brilliancy and beauty when removed from their environment, like sea-shells from the beach; a verification of the sentiment so beautifully expressed in the lines of Emerson:
"I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea-born treasures home;