but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on their bases, and united with reentrant angles, their convex surfaces toward us, so that the ground-plan might be called a species of quatre-foil.  In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned door-way, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know the “Open sesame.”  Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious art, with flowing sacerdotal garments.

The structure terminates above in a double dome, whose figure may be imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite columnar entourage of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of Pisa.  The result of this arrangement is an aerial, yet massive beauty, without parallel in the architecture of the world.  I have not conveyed to any mind an idea of the grandeur of this pile, nor could I, even with the assistance of a diagram.  I can only say that the Cathedral Buttes are a lesson for the architects of all Christendom,—­a purely novel and original creation, of such marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I simultaneously exclaimed,—­“Oh that the master-builders of the world could come here even for a single day!  The result would be an entirely new style of architecture,—­an American school, as distinct from all the rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine.”  If they could come, the art of building would have a regeneration.  “Amazing” is the only word for this glorious work of Nature.  I could have bowed down with awe and prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues, made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon-hands for the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone-dream of petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of God, to wait the judgment of Eblis and the earthquakes of the Last Day.

After leaving Church Buttes and passing Fort Bridger, our attention slept upon what it had seen until we entered the region of the canons.  These are defiles, channelled across the whole breadth of the Wahsatch Mountains almost to the level of their base, walled by precipices of red sandstone or sugar-loaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of the Hudson become insignificant as a garden-fence.