Over the red wall limestone, with its amphitheaters, chambers, niches, and royal arches--a climb of 1,600 feet--is the banded sandstone, the entablature over the niched and columned marble, an adamantine molding 800 feet in thickness, stretching along the walls of the canyon through hundreds of miles. This banded sandstone has massive strata separated by friable shales. The massive strata are the horizontal elements in the entablature, but the intervening shales are carved with a beautiful fretwork of vertical forms, the sculpture of the rills. The massive sandstones are white, gray, blue, and purple, but the shales are a brilliant red; thus variously colored bands of massive rock are separated by bands of vertically carved shales of a brilliant hue.
On these highly colored beds the tower limestone is found, 1,000 feet in height. Everywhere this is carved into towers, minarets, and domes, gray and cold, golden and warm, alabaster and pure, in wonderful variety.
Such are the vertical elements of which the Grand Canyon facade is composed. Its horizontal elements must next be considered. The river meanders in great curves, which are themselves broken into curves of smaller magnitude. The streams that head far back in the plateau on either side come down in gorges and break the wall into sections. Each lateral canyon has a secondary system of laterals, and the secondary canyons are broken by tertiary canyons; so the crags are forever branching, like the limbs of an oak. That which has been described as a wall is such only in its grand effect. In detail it is a series of structures separated by a ramification of canyons, each having its own walls. Thus, in passing down the canyon it seems to be inclosed by walls, but oftener by salients--towering structures that stand between canyons that run back into the plateau. Sometimes gorges of the second or third order have met before reaching the brink of the Grand Canyon, and then great salients are cut off from the wall and stand out as buttes--huge pavilions in the architecture of the canyon. The scenic elements thus described are fused and combined in very different ways.
We measured the length of the Grand Canyon by the length of the river running through it, but the running extent of wall cannot be measured in this manner. In the black gneiss, which is at the bottom, the wall may stand above the river for a few hundred yards or a
mile or two; then, to follow the foot of the wall, you must pass into a lateral canyon for a long distance, perhaps miles, and then back again on the other side of the lateral canyon; then along by the river until another lateral canyon is reached, which must be headed in the black gneiss. So, for a dozen miles of river through the gneiss, there may be a hundred miles of wall on either side. Climbing to the summit of the black gneiss and following the wall in the variegated quartzite, it is found to be stretched out to a still greater length, for it is cut with more lateral gorges. In like manner, there is yet greater length of the mottled, or alcove, sandstone wall; and the red wall is still farther stretched out in ever branching gorges. To make the distance for ten miles along the river by walking along the top of the red wall, it would be necessary to travel several hundred miles. The length of the wall reaches its maximum in the banded sandstone, which is terraced more than any of the other formations. The tower limestone wall is less tortuous. To start at the head of the Grand Canyon on one of the terraces of the banded sandstone and follow it to the foot of the Grand Canyon, which by river is a distance of 217 miles, it would be necessary to travel many thousand miles by the winding Way; that is, the banded wall is many thousand miles in length.
Stand at some point on the brink of the Grand Canyon where you can overlook the river, and the details of the structure, the vast labyrinth of gorges of which it is composed, are scarcely noticed; the elements are lost in the grand effect, and a broad, deep, flaring gorge of many colors is seen. But stand down among these gorges and the landscape seems to be composed of huge vertical elements of wonderful form. Above, it is an open, sunny gorge; below, it is deep and gloomy. Above, it is a chasm; below, it is a stairway from gloom to heaven.