Despite its fringe of green it was hoary with age.

Every looming gray-faced wall, massive and sublime, seemed a monument of its mastery over time.

Every deep-cut canyon, showing the skeleton ribs, the caverns and caves, its avalanche-carved slides, its long, fan-shaped, spreading taluses, carried conviction to the spectator that it was but a frail bit of rock, that its life was little and brief, that upon it had been laid the merciless curse of nature.

Change! Change must unknit the very knots of the center of the earth.

So its strength lay in the sublimity of its defiance.