From here on for many miles the whole character of the canyon changes.
First a dike appears; this is a wall of black basalt crossing the river;
it is of lava thrust up from below through a huge crevice broken in the
rock by earthquake agency. On the east the Little Colorado comes; here
it is a river of salt water, and it derives its salt a few miles up the
stream. The main Colorado flows along the eastern and southern wall.
Climbing this for a few hundred feet you may look off toward the
northwest and gaze at the cliffs of the Kaibab Plateau.
This is the point where we built a trail down a side canyon where Mr.
Walcott was to make his winter residence and study of the region; it is
very complicated and exhibits a vast series of unconformable rocks of
high antiquity. These lower rocks are of many colors; in large part they
are shales. The region, which appears to be composed of bright-colored
hills washed naked by the rain, is, in fact, beset with a multitude of
winding canyons with their own precipitous walls. It is a region of many
canyons in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself.
In this beautiful region Mr. Walcott, reading the book of geology, lived
in a summerland during all of a long winter while the cliffs above were
covered with snow which prevented his egress to the world. His
companions, three young Mormons, longing for a higher degree of
civilization, gazed wistfully at the snow-clad barriers by which they
were inclosed. One was a draughtsman, another a herder of his stock, and
the third his cook. They afterward told me that it was a long winter of
homesickness, and that months dragged away as years, but Mr. Walcott
himself had the great book of geology to read, and to him it was a
winter of delight.
A half dozen miles below the basaltic wall the river enters a channel
carved in 800 or 1,000 feet of dark gneiss of very hard rock. Here the
channel is narrow and very swift and beset with rapids and falls. On the
south and southwest the wall rises abruptly from the water to the summit
of the plateau for about 6,000 feet, but across the river on the north
and west mountains of gneiss and quartzites appear, sometimes rising to
the height of a thousand feet. These are mountains in the bottom of a
canyon. The buttes and plateaus of the inter-canyon region are composed
of shales, sandstones, and limestones, which give rise to vast
architectural shelving and to pinnacles and towers of gigantic
proportions, the whole embossed with a marvelously minute system of
fretwork carved by the artistic clouds. Looking beyond these mountains,
buttes, and plateaus vistas of the walls of the great plateau are seen.
From these walls project salients, and deep re-entrant angles appear.
The whole scene is forever reminding you of mighty architectural
pinnacles and towers and balustrades and arches and columns with lattice
work and delicate carving. All of these architectural features are
sublime by titanic painting in varied hues—pink, red, brown, lavender,
gray, blue, and black. In some lights the saffron prevails, in other
lights vermilion, and yet in other lights the grays and blacks
predominate. At times, and perhaps in rare seasons, clouds and cloudlets
form in the canyon below and wander among the side canyons and float
higher and higher until they are dissolved in the upper air, or perhaps
they accumulate to hide great portions of the landscape. Then through
rifts in the clouds vistas of Wonderland are seen. Such is that portion
of the canyon around the great south bend of the Colorado River past the
point of the Kaibab Plateau.