Titan of Chasms. The Grand Canyon of Arizona

For eight or ten miles below the mouth of the Little Colorado, the river is in the variegated quartzites, and a wonderful fretwork of forms and colors, peculiar to this rock, stretches back for miles to a labyrinth of the red-wall cliff; then below, the black gneiss is entered and soon has reached an altitude of 800 feet and sometimes more than 1,000 feet, and upon this black gneiss all the other structures in their wonderful colors are lifted. These continue for about seventy miles, when the black gneiss below is lost, for the walls are dropped down by the West Kaibab Fault and the river flows in the quartzites.

Then for eighty miles the mottled (or alcove) sandstones are found in the river bed. The course of the canyon is a little south of west and is comparatively straight. At the top of the red-wall limestone there is a broad terrace, two or three miles in width, composed of hills of wonderful forms carved in the banded beds, and back of this is seen a cliff in the tower limestone. Along the lower course of this stretch the whole character of the canyon is changed by another set of complicating conditions. We have now reached a region of volcanic activity. After the canyons were cut nearly to their present depth, lavas poured out and volcanoes were built on the walls of the canyon, but not in the canyon itself, though at places rivers of molten rock rolled down the walls into the Colorado.