At the horizon, at the end of an immense plain and tinted rose by the reflection of the setting sun, a city in ruins appears to us, an immense city surrounded by walls and bulwarks, filled by a palace crowned with gigantic domes and monuments of the most fantastic and bizarre architecture. At intervals on a soil white as snow rise embattled chateaus of brick red, pyramids with their sharp-pointed summits topped with shapeless masses which seem to rock in the wind, a pillar of a hundred meters rises in the midst of this chaos of ruins like a gigantic lighthouse.[21] De Girardin was also impressed by the large deposits of fossil remains in the area. “The soil is formed here and there of a thick bed of petrified bones,” he wrote, “sometimes in a state perfectly preserved, sometimes broken and reduced to dust.” The party discovered “petrified turtles,” some of which were “admirably preserved and weighing up to 150 pounds....” The expedition also found “a head of a rhinoceros equally petrified, and the jawbone of a dog or wolf of a special kind, furnished with all its teeth.” At places the scientists located “heaps of teeth and scraps of broken jawbones; ... bones and vertebrae of the oreodon, the mastdon [sic] and the elephant.” However, after exploring for three days in the region without having discovered “the elephants, the buffaloes, and the petrified men of which they had spoken to us so much,” the party began its journey back to Fort Pierre.[22] Dr. Evans himself was not only impressed by the scenic qualities of the Badlands but by the scientific importance of the region as well. He wrote: After leaving the locality on Sage Creek, affording the above-mentioned fossils, crossing that stream, and proceeding in the direction of White River, about twelve or fifteen miles, the formation of the Mauvaises Terres proper bursts into view, disclosing as here depicted, one of the most extraordinary and picturesque sights that can be found in the whole Missouri country. From the high prairies, that rise in the background, by a series of terraces or benches, towards the spurs of the Rocky Mountains, the traveller looks down into an extensive valley, that may be said to constitute a world of its own, and which appears to have been formed, partly by an extensive vertical fault, partly by the long-continued influence of the scooping action of denudation. The width of this valley may be about thirty miles, and its whole length about ninety, as it stretches away westwardly, towards the base of the gloomy and dark range of mountains known as the Black Hills. Its most depressed portion, three hundred feet below the general level of the surrounding country, is clothed with scanty grasses, and covered by a soil similar to that of the higher ground.