Real mountains many of them are, for from their bases on the plateau, 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the bottom of the inner cañon, they rise 1,500 to 2,500 feet, nearly or quite to the level of the tops of the cliffs bounding the outer cañon. Nearly all the length of the cañon is through sandstones, and limestones, and shales, resplendent with the colors which add so much to the beauty of Rocky Mountain scenery. The almost uniform horizontality of stratification of these rocks demonstrates that the erosion of the cañon was little aided or affected by any violent upheavals or disturbances of the rocks. We see clearly about twenty-five miles each way along the cañon, and somewhat indistinctly probably another twenty-five or thirty miles each way, and everywhere is the same indescribable splendor of color and of beauty of form. It is a new "Holy City," and whether viewed from above, by a ride or walk along the edge of the cañon, or from the multitudinous turns and loops of the trail by which one can descend on horseback to the plateau and ride across to the edge of the inner cañon, whence a path enables us to safely climb on foot down to the river's edge, everywhere we seem to be gazing on the ruins of cities, palaces, towers, and temples, such as might have been builded by the gnomes and genii of the "Arabian Nights." Speaking of these weather-sculptured buttes or mountains of bare and splendidly colored rock which stand within the outer cañon, Dutton says: "Some of these are gorgeous pagodas, sculptured in the usual fashion, and ending in sharp finials at the summit. Others are the cloister buttes with wing-walls and gables, panels and alcoves. All are quarried out upon a superlative scale of magnitude, and every one of them is a marvel. The great number and intricacy of these objects confuse the senses and do not permit the eye to rest. The mind wanders incessantly from one to another and cannot master the multitude of things crowded at once upon its attention. There are scores of these structures, any one of which, if it could be placed by itself upon some distant plain, would be regarded as one of the great wonders of the world," and of the colors he says: