They all lie
nearly horizontal, and the beds of softer material have been washed out,
leaving the harder forming a series of shelves. Long lines of these are
seen, of varying thickness, from one or two to twenty or thirty feet,
and the spaces between have the same variability. This morning I spend
two or three hours in climbing among these shelves, and then I pass
above them and go up a long slope to the foot of the cliff and try to
discover some way by which I can reach the top of the wall; but I find
my progress cut off by an amphitheater. Then I wander away around to the
left, up a little gulch and along benches, climbing from time to time,
until I reach an altitude of nearly 2,000 feet and can get no higher.
From this point I can look off to the west, up side canyons of the
Colorado, and see the edge of a great plateau, from which streams run
down into the Colorado, and deep gulches in the escarpment which faces
us, continued by canyons, ragged and flaring and set with cliffs and
towering crags, down to the river. I can see far up Marble Canyon to
long lines of chocolate-colored cliffs, and above these the Vermilion
Cliffs. I can see, also, up the Colorado Chiquito, through a very ragged
and broken canyon, with sharp salients set out from the walls on either
side, their points overlapping, so that a huge tooth of marble on one
side seems to be set between two teeth on the opposite; and I can also
get glimpses of walls standing away back from the river, while over my
head are mural escarpments not possible to be scaled.
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