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.