He had some vagaries (the vagaries of those who are subjugated by a strong and permanent emotion) which approached insanity. For instance, he selected a gigantic column of sandstone as bearing some resemblance to Clara, and so identified it with her that presently he could see her face crowning it, though concealed by the similitude of a rocky veil. This image took such possession of him that he watched it with fascination, and when a monstrous cliff slid between it and him he felt as if here were a new parting; as if he were once more bidding her a speechless, hopeless farewell. During the greater part of this voyage he was a very uninteresting companion. He sat quiet and silent; sometimes he slightly moved his lips; he was whispering a name. Glover and Sweeny, who had only known him for a month, and supposed that he had always been what they saw him, considered him an eccentric. "Naterally not quite himself," judged the skipper. "Some folks is born knocked on the head." "May be officers is always that a way," was one of Sweeny's suggestions. "It must be mighty dull bein' an officer." We must not forget the Great Cañon. The voyagers were amid magnitudes and sublimities of nature which oppressed as if they were powers and principalities of supernature. They were borne through an architecture of aqueous and plutonic agencies whose smallest fantasies would be belittled by comparisons with coliseums, labyrinths, cathedrals, pyramids, and stonehenges. For example, they circled a bend of which the extreme delicate angle was a jutting pilaster five hundred feet broad and a mile high, its head towering in a sharp tiara far above the brow of the plateau, and its sides curved into extravagances of dizzy horror. It seemed as if it might be a pillar of confinement and punishment for some Afreet who had defied Heaven. On either side of this monster fissures a thousand feet deep wrinkled the forehead of the precipice. Armies might have been buried in their abysses; yet they scarcely deformed the line of the summits. They ran back for many miles; they had once been the channels of streams which helped to drain the plateau; yet they were merely superficial cracks in the huge mass of sandstone and limestone; they were scarcely noticeable features of the Titanic landscape. From this bend forward the beauty of the cañon was sublime, horrible, satanic. Constantly varying, its transformations were like those of the chief among demons, in that they were always indescribably magnificent and always indescribably terrible. Now it was a straight, clean chasm between even hedges of cliff which left open only a narrow line of the beauty and mercy of the heavens. Again, where it was entered by minor cañons, it became a breach through crowded pandemoniums of ruined architectures and forsaken, frowning imageries. Then it led between enormous pilasters, columns, and caryatides, mitred with conical peaks which had once been ranges of mountains. Juttings and