She could not help feeling like one of the spirits in prison as she glanced at the awful solitude around her. Notwithstanding the river, there still was the desert. The little plain was but an oasis. Two miles to the east the San Juan burst out of a defile of sandstone, and a mile to the west it disappeared in a similar chasm. The walls of these gorges rose abruptly two thousand feet above the hurrying waters. All around were the monstrous, arid, herbless, savage, cruel ramparts of the plateau. No outlook anywhere; the longest reach of the eye was not five miles; then came towering precipices. The travellers were like ants gathered on an inch of earth at the bottom of a fissure in a quarry. The horizon was elevated and limited, resting everywhere on harsh lines of rock which were at once near the spectator and far above him. The overhanging plateaux strove to shut him out from the sight of heaven. What variety there was in the grim monotony appeared in shapes that were horrible to the weary and sorrowful. On the other side of the San Juan towered an assemblage of pinnacles which looked like statues; but these statues were a thousand feet above the stream, and the smallest of them was at least four hundred feet high. To a lost wanderer, and especially to a dispirited woman, such magnitude was not sublime, but terrifying. It seemed as if these shapes were gods who had no mercy, or demons who were full of malevolence. Still higher, on a jutting crag which overhung the black river, was a castle a hundred fold huger than man ever built, with ramparts that were dizzy precipices and towers such as no daring could scale. It faced the horrible group of stony deities as if it were their pandemonium. The whole landscape was a hideous Walhalla, a fit abode for the savage giant gods of the old Scandinavians. Thor and Woden would have been at home in it. The Cyclops and Titans would have been too little for it. The Olympian deities could not be conceived of as able or willing to exist in such a hideous chaos. No creature of the Greek imagination would have been a suitable inhabitant for it except Prometheus alone. Here his eternal agony and boundless despair might not have been out of place. There was no comfort in the river. It came out of unknown and inhospitable mystery, and went into a mystery equally unknown and inhospitable. To what fate it might lead was as uncertain as whence it arrived. A sombre flood, reddish brown in certain lights, studded with rocks which raised ghosts of unmoving foam, flowing with a speed which perpetually boiled and eddied, promising nothing to the voyager but thousand-fold shipwreck, a breathless messenger from the mountains to the ocean, it wheeled incessantly from stony portal to stony portal, a brief gleam of power and cruelty. The impression which it produced was in unison with the sublime malignity and horror of the landscape.