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After this camp had been located and more gasoline taken aboard the boys were to head their craft toward the Tunit Chas mountains. What would follow they could not foresee. With good luck they might be able to hover birdlike over the peaks, canyons and plateaus for five days. With bad luck they might have to come down sooner or fall.
Thus the streams below are alternately choked and cleared from period to period. To the south of the Vermilion Cliffs the last series or zone of plateaus north of the Grand Canyon is found. The summits of these plateaus are of cherty limestone.
The high plateaus are generally treeless, but are covered with such shrubs as greasewood and sage-brush. We see now that our climate is the product of many factors. It frequently varies greatly in places only a few miles distant from each other.
From a carpet of sand, on which lilies grow, these giant bamboos spring, fern-like, in enormous clumps, spreading their arms and feathery crests in all directions, and, meeting overhead, form avenues and lanes, which remind one of some beautiful cathedral aisle. Different in many ways from the forests I have described are those of the cooler plateaus and mountain ranges of Northern Burma.
So suddenly had come the change from frigid cold to moderate warmth, that the vast fields of ice once moving southward were not thawed to their utmost depths even when rank vegetation and a teeming life had sprung up in the now European area, and so it came that, in some places, cold, white monuments and glittering plateaus still showed themselves amid the forest and fed the tumbling streams which made the rivers rushing to the ocean.
This cleft is the gorge which to-day is called Cañon de las Bocas. South of it the plateaus continue with barren undulations and whitish hills. They rise gradually to the base of a sombre mountain cluster, the bulk of which was wrapped in clouds, as well as the huge mass of the Sandia chain to its right. Still farther to the right the Rio Grande valley opened.
A broad upheaval of great blocks of the earth's crust without tilting or disturbance has produced the plateaus of Arizona and Utah. The gorges that have been rapidly cut into such great upheaved blocks form part of the world's most striking scenery. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado with its tremendous platforms, mesas, and awe-inspiring cliffs could have been formed in no other way.
Since the overland railways have long been carrying many thousands of persons across the elevated plateaus of the continent the mirage in many of its customary aspects has become pretty well known to great numbers of persons all over the Union, and the tales of early observers who came "der blains agross" are received with a less frigid inhospitality than they formerly were by incredulous pioneers who had come "der Horn aroundt," as the illustrious Hans Breitmann phrases it; but in its rarer and more marvelous manifestations, the mirage is still a rock upon which many a reputation for veracity is wrecked remediless.
The dark growths which crown the plateaus are in reality pine trees, which, on the north rim of the Canyon, attain immense size. They, and lesser tree growths, descend to the bottom of the second mass of talus. The Rocks of the North Wall. The rock bands on the opposite walls, a large part of the way down, are like those found on the same north wall seen from El Tovar.
By the white light of day-dawn we quit Chellata, with the naked crests of the Djurjura printing themselves on the starry vault behind us and the valley below bathed in clouds. As we descend we seem to waken the white, red-roofed villages with our steps. The plateaus are gradually enlivened with spreading herds and men going forth to labor.
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