We camped for the night below a point where the river makes a sharp
bend, parallel with its course. This we surmounted in the morning,
following a rounded wall of limestone, for all the world like a
decayed rampart of some ancient city. A wide floor of rock at its
base made beautiful walking to a place where the lofty escarpment
showed exposures of limestone underlying an enormous mass of dark
sandstone, topped by tar-clay. It is a portentous cliff, bearing
a curiously Eastern look, as if some great pyramid had been riven
vertically, and the exposed surface scarred and scooped by the
weather into a multitude of antic hollows, grotesque projections,
and unimaginable shapes. Here, also, the knives of passers-by had
carved numerous autographs, marring the majestic cliff with their
ludicrous incongruity. Are we not all sinners in this way? "John
Jones," cut into a fantastic buttress which would fittingly adorn a
wizard's temple, may be a poor exhibit of human vanity; but, after
all, the real John Jones is more imperishable than the rock, which
seems scaling, anyway, from the top, and may, by and by, carry the
inscriptions with it. It was hard to tear one's self away from such
a wonderful structure as this, the most striking feature of its kind
on the whole river.
Farther on, escarped banks, consisting of boulders and pebbles
imbedded in tenacious clay, rose to a great height, their tops
clothed with rich moss, and wooded with a close growth of pine,
the hollows being full of delicious raspberries, now dead ripe.
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