The pilgrims would have had cause to rejoice could they have travelled as easily as the drops of water, and been as certain of their goal.

But the rivers had made roads for themselves, and man had not yet had time to do likewise.
The great central plateau of North America is a Mer de Glace in stone.

It is a continent of rock, gullied by furious rivers; plateau on plateau of sandstone, with sluiceways through which lakes have escaped; the whole surface gigantically grotesque with the carvings of innumerable waters.
What is remarkable in the scenery is, that its sublimity is an inversion of the sublimity of almost all other grand scenery.

It is not so much the heights that are prodigious as the abysses.

At certain points in the course of the Colorado of the West you can drop a plumb line six thousand feet before it will reach the bosom of the current; and you can only gain the water level by turning backward for scores of miles and winding laboriously down some subsidiary canon, itself a chasm of awful grandeur.
Our travellers were now amid wild labyrinths of ranges, and buttes, and canons, which were not so much a portion of the great plateau as they were the _debris_ that constituted its flanks.