They are kept alive by the moisture of the heavy snows of winter, and the coolness of the nights in the warmer months, checking the evaporation, and by occasional rains in summer, mostly in July and August.

We are promised a branch railroad in the near future from the mainline of the Santa Fe to the Canyon.

All previous observations of canyons fail utterly to give any adequate ideas of the immensity and the splendor of this, "the sublimest spectacle on earth." No narrow crack in the earth's crust is this canyon, but a vast chasm 217 miles long, from five to twelve miles wide and from 5,000 to 6,000 feet deep, with a great river rolling tumultuously along its bottom, miles away from us as the crow flies, and nearly a mile below us vertically.

As there are very few places where it is possible to climb down to the river, one might perish from thirst while wandering along the brink of this canyon, and having in plain view at many points one of the greatest rivers of the west coast of America.

It is the only canyon on earth vast enough to have scores of mountains within it.

It is a double canyon, i. e. a canyon within a canyon.

The outer canyon is from 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep, and from five to twelve miles wide.

Its general direction is east and west, but the mighty river, which in ancient geologic ages eroded this vast abyss, curved, like all rivers, now this way and now that, so that each wall is recessed in mighty amphitheaters, between which comparatively narrow promontories or points run out from one to six miles into the canyon.

From the base of the mighty palisade which forms the walls of the outer canyon stretches a plateau 5, 8, 10, or 12 miles wide, to the equally lofty palisade which forms the opposite wall of the outer canyon, and somewhere near the middle of this plateau is sunk the inner canyon, another 2,000 to 3,000 feet deep, with a width at the top varying from one-half to three-fourths of a mile, and in its somber depths rolls the ever turbid Colorado, ceaselessly at its endless labor of cutting down the mountains and sweeping their ruins to the sea.

Scattered all over this plateau are the remains of what were once long promontories like the points on which we now walk or ride far out towards the middle of the canyon, but which have weathered so that they are now lines of hills and mountains.

Real mountains many of them are, for from their bases on the plateau, 2,000 to 3,000 feet above the bottom of the inner canyon, they rise 1,500 to 2,500 feet, nearly or quite to the level of the tops of the cliffs bounding the outer canyon.

Nearly all the length of the canyon is through sandstones, and limestones , and shales, resplendent with the colors which add so much to the beauty of Rocky Mountain scenery.

The almost uniform horizontality of stratification of these rocks demonstrates that the erosion of the canyon was little aided or affected by any violent upheavals or disturbances of the rocks.

We see clearly about twenty-five miles each way along the canyon, and somewhat indistinctly probably another twenty-five or thirty miles each way, and everywhere is the same indescribable splendor of color and of beauty of form.

It is a new "Holy City," and whether viewed from above, by a ride or walk along the edge of the canyon, or from the multitudinous turns and loops of the trail by which one can descend on horseback to the plateau and ride across to the edge of the inner canyon, whence a path enables us to safely climb on foot down to the river's edge, everywhere we seem to be gazing on the ruins of cities; palaces, towers, and temples, such as might have been builded by the gnomes and genii of the "Arabian Nights."