Thus the canon
grows wider and deeper. So also do the side-canons and amphitheaters,
while secondary gorges and cirques gradually isolate masses of the
promontories, forming new buildings, all of which are being weathered
and pulled and shaken down while being built, showing destruction and
creation as one. We see the proudest temples and palaces in stateliest
attitudes, wearing their sheets of detritus as royal robes, shedding off
showers of red and yellow stones like trees in autumn shedding their
leaves, going to dust like beautiful days to night, proclaiming as with
the tongues of angels the natural beauty of death.
Every building is seen to be a remnant of once continuous beds of
sediments--sand and slime on the floor of an ancient sea, and filled
with the remains of animals, and that every particle of the sandstones
and limestones of these wonderful structures was derived from other
landscapes, weathered and rolled and ground in the storms and streams
of other ages. And when we examine the escarpments, hills, buttes, and
other monumental masses of the plateau on either side of the canon, we
discover that an amount of material has been carried off in the general
denudation of the region compared with which even that carried away
in the making of the Grand Canon is as nothing. Thus each wonder in
sight becomes a window through which other wonders come to view.
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