This is the point where we built a trail down a side canyon where Mr. Walcott was to make his winter residence and study of the region; it is very complicated and exhibits a vast series of unconformable rocks of high antiquity. These lower rocks are of many colors; in large part they are shales. The region, which appears to be composed of bright-colored hills washed naked by the rain, is, in fact, beset with a multitude of winding canyons with their own precipitous walls. It is a region of many canyons in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself. In this beautiful region Mr. Walcott, reading the book of geology, lived in a summerland during all of a long winter while the cliffs above were covered with snow which prevented his egress to the world. His companions, three young Mormons, longing for a higher degree of civilization, gazed wistfully at the snow-clad barriers by which they were inclosed. One was a draughtsman, another a herder of his stock, and the third his cook. They afterward told me that it was a long winter of homesickness, and that months dragged away as years, but Mr. Walcott himself had the great book of geology to read, and to him it was a winter of delight. A half dozen miles below the basaltic wall the river enters a channel carved in 800 or 1,000 feet of dark gneiss of very hard rock. Here the channel is narrow and very swift and beset with rapids and falls. On the south and southwest the wall rises abruptly from the water to the summit of the plateau for about 6,000 feet, but across the river on the north and west mountains of gneiss and quartzites appear, sometimes rising to the height of a thousand feet. These are mountains in the bottom of a canyon. The buttes and plateaus of the inter-canyon region are composed of shales, sandstones, and limestones, which give rise to vast architectural shelving and to pinnacles and towers of gigantic proportions, the whole embossed with a marvelously minute system of fretwork carved by the artistic clouds. Looking beyond these mountains, buttes, and plateaus vistas of the walls of the great plateau are seen. From these walls project salients, and deep re-entrant angles appear.