The sides of these barren masses, seamed by the action of water in remote geologic ages, and never softened or smoothed by the gentle attrition of rain, were infinitely more wild and jagged in their details than ruins.

It seemed as if the Titans had built here, and their works had been shattered by thunderbolts.
Many heights were truncated mounds of rock, resembling gigantic platforms with ruinous sides, such as are known in this Western land as _mesas_ or _buttes_.

They were Nature's enormous mockery of the most ambitious architecture of man, the pyramids of Egypt and the platform of Baalbek.
Terrace above terrace of shattered wall; escarpments which had been displaced as if by the explosion of some incredible mine; ramparts which were here high and regular, and there gaping in mighty fissures, or suddenly altogether lacking; long sweeps of stairway, winding dizzily upwards, only to close in an impossible leap: there was no end to the fantastic outlines and the suggestions of destruction.
Nor were the open spaces between these rocky mounds less remarkable.

In one valley, the course of a river which vanished ages ago, the power of fire had left its monuments amid those of the power of water.

The sedimentary rock of sandstone, shales, and marl, not only showed veins of ignitible lignite, but it was pierced by the trap which had been shot up from earth's flaming recesses.