The precipices were not bare and plain faces of rock, destitute of minor finish and of color. They had their horrible decorations; they showed the ingenuity and the artistic force of the Afreets who had fashioned them; they were wrought and tinted with a demoniac splendor suited to their magnitude. It seemed as if some goblin Michel Angelo had here done his carving and frescoing at the command of the lords of hell. Layers of brown, gray, and orange sandstone, alternated from base to summit; and these tints were laid on with a breadth of effect which was prodigious: a hundred feet in height and miles in length at a stroke of the brush. The architectural and sculptural results were equally monstrous. There were lateral shelves twenty feet in width, and thousands of yards in length. There were towers, pilasters, and formless caryatides, a quarter of a mile in height. Great bulks projected, capped by gigantic mitres or diadems, and flanked by cavernous indentations. In consequence of the varying solidity of the stone, the river had wrought the precipices into a series of innumerable monuments, more or less enormous, commemorative of combats. There had been interminable strife here between the demons of earth and the demons of water, and each side had set up its trophies. It was the Vatican and the Catacombs of the Genii; it was the museum and the mausoleum of the forces of nature. At various points tributary gorges, the graves of fluvial gods who had perished long ago, opened into the main cañon. In passing these the voyagers had momentary glimpses of sublimities and horrors which seemed like the handiwork of that "anarch old," who wrought before the shaping of the universe. One of these sarcophagi was a narrow cleft, not more than eighty feet broad, cut from surface to base of a bed of sandstone one-third of a mile in depth. It was inhabited by an eternal gloom which was like the shadow of the blackness of darkness. The stillness, the absence of all life whether animal or vegetable, the dungeon-like closeness of the monstrous walls, were beyond language. Another gorge was a ruin. The rock here being of various degrees of density, the waters had essayed a thousand channels. All the softer veins had been scooped out and washed away, leaving the harder blocks and masses piled in a colossal grotesque confusion. Along the sloping sides of the gap stood bowlders, pillars, needles, and strange shapes of stone, peering over each other's heads into the gulf below. It was as if an army of misshapen monsters and giants had been petrified with horror, while staring at some inconceivable desolation and ruin. There was no hope for this concrete despair; no imaginable voice could utter for it a word of consolation; the gazer, like Dante amid the tormented, could only "look and pass on."