The Temple of the Gods

The Temple of the Gods By J. Cecil Alter, Meteorologist, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Weather Bureau

They came out as if to meet the visitors, with their arms affectionately laced across their backs, honeymooning in rhyth- mic step and laughter, on the brink of this sunken garden of grandeur. They had found their atmosphere; the spirit of this templed transept is the spirit of strange beauty, and its colors are the honeymoon hues. An older and perhaps less romantic grandson-of-a-pioneer led his mount over to two busy photographers, and gazed in wonder at the extravagant expenditure for photographs on the rim of his summer horse pasture. "No, sir; I never have paid much attention to it;" he frankly confessed. "It is pretty common to us folks. "I was born right over behind that cliff in the fields of the — town of Tropic you can see them from here, only three or four miles away. I have trailed stock through here every summer since I could ride a horse, but I have never been off the trail this far in my life until I saw you fellows just now. "Yes, it is kind of interesting; rough country for critters off the trail, though, down in there; they used to call it Bryce's Canyon when 'Bill' Bryce ran stock up here, before the govern- ment took the pasture over. Mother was born a little further down on the Paria, but she never was here until last summer. "The Forest Ranger who has had these folks making trails down into the breaks, says autos have come here from California and Chicago, and that lots more will come next year, maybe. "You haven't seen any fresh horse tracks in the snow, have you?" and he disappeared through the forest. The visitors were at the edge of a grass-carpeted forest of yellow pines on the rim wall of the Paunsagunt Plateau—the southeasternmost section of the Wasatch Plateau, in extreme — south-central Utah the rim of the Great Basin overlooking— the great geological amphitheatre of the Paria, to Table Cliff Plateau, which mothers the Escalante river, and "stands as a glorious Parthenon upon the summit of a vast Acropolis," ac- cording to Dutton. Away to the southeast for seventy-five miles runs the Kai- parowits Plateau, twin to the Kaibab, ending at the Glen Can- yon of the Colorado River. Buttressing this headland, appar-

THE TEMPLE OF THE GODS View eastward across the principal configuration to Table Cliff Plateau, in far distance, eighteen miles away, across the Paria amphitheatre. Note trees at base of variegated spindles. Narrow, deep alleyways run to the left to the rim wall.

THE TEMPLE OF THE GODS View through an alleyway from the creeping talus, about midway from the rim; looking south across the principal configuration or amphitheatre. The sun illumines the tops of the pier at the left, while some snow has lodged farther down. Note the figure in the bottom; he is still a hundred feet above the bottom of the amphitheatre.

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ently, on the far side of the river near the Crossing of the Fathers, stands Navajo Mountain, eighty-five miles in the line of sight, yet as distinct a figure in the view as the cedar-clad mesa known as the Wah Weap, and the Paria bottoms in the middle distance. feet, filling a frame one-by-three miles in Beneath their size, lay The Temple of the Gods the forester's name for the most beautiful section of the entire Vermilion Cliff country. "Pink Cliffs" it is designated by the geographer; the "Paunsa- gunt Fault" by the seismologist; the "Cretaceous and Jurassic strata" by the geologist; and the "Miocene and Eocene ages" by the paleontologist.

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THE TEMPLE OF THE GODS A general view of the two largest and most southerly amphitheatres- camping sites at right. The variegation is due to illumination; it changes continually in partly cloudy weather.

To the visitors, no appellation would remain appropriate; it would not stay described, for it was kaleidoscopic in color and in apparent form. The cameras drank it in greedily, and the minds of the visitors must have readily absorbed the beauty, for it seemed to be such a joyous mental journey they were making.

Through the geologist's eyes they could faintly see the ris- ing of the earth's crust southward to central Arizona, over an area of fifteen thousand square miles, while the waters of a vast Eocene lake carried ten thousand feet of the Tertiary-Creta- ceous- J urassic-Triassic stratas of the earth's veneering into the Pacific by way of the Colorado River.

THE TEMPLE OF THE GODS The groups of translucent statuary, each figure having bells and collars of different colors. The pines are filtering a silvery light, a cloud hangs low and obscures the distant view.

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At the visitor's feet is the selvage of this enormous erosion area; the sinuous, abrupt rim wall, the broad, creeping talus apron, and through this the field of obelisks, pilasters, pillars, towers, entablatures, kiosks and other architectural features in great variety and variegation. The colors would not stay named more than a few minutes on a partly cloudy day; the native brown, ochre, pink, or gray of the mass of marl, becomes bronze, yellow, white, salmon, orange rose and red under the changing light like the desert chameleon. And because of the high- albedo, or reflecting power, of the walls and surfaces, illuminating the shady sides of adja- cent figures from unseen light sources, a weird translucency re- sults, in which the observer sees a slender column begin to brighten, then to glow, then turn red hot, and then cool off in the cloud shadow. Figures in the line of reflected light cast ghostly shadows into the livid translucency of the pillars and walls; and the direct sun will gild the edge of a round column in pure gold. Giant fingers of red amidst the pigmy pines suddenly be- come monster bananas or marshmallows in the light; and shaded groups of statuary become living models of exquisite beauty as a searching light shaft between the clouds from the sun singles out the features on this stage of pantomimics, and it commands attention like a brass band in a circus. The decorative, graceful, tufted yellow pine trees; the bril- liant, reddish evergreen manzanita kinnikinic and the bashful squirrel-tail pine, standing about on the soft talus slopes and in the bottoms, make fine contrast with the yellow, ochre or gray background as seen from above, and they become the daintiest and rarest of filagree. Descending into the semi-sacred region on a thin layer of melting snow, the visitors gather great "gobs" of the clayey paint on their feet; and as they trail desecratingly across the great Artist's color palette, it is seen how very much cosmetic is required to maintain the scenery in such extremely ladylike daintiness and purity of complexion. Here one sees a candy kitchen of creamy cones, marshmal- low fingers, translucent jellies, and paste-like pinnacles; and — there an art group of roughly-finished statuary cloaked nuns stand silently in white groups amidst the bronze busts of famous men; entire families stand in reverence about the statues of de- parted ones; and even the dissolving talus creeps downward — from such as these in respectful silence no loose and bounding rocks to break in upon the vespers. Here and there tall khaki-clad sentinels bravely rise above all the rest to watch; and scattered about are lifelike busts com-

THE TEMPLE OF THE GODS View eastward across the Paria and the Wah Weap, the day before, snow came, November 16, 1918; a study in variegation, erosion and disso- lution.

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parable to those of noted men that arise in the minds of the beholder. Arches and peep-holes appear beneath the archi- traves and in the thinner walls high aloft, as if to accommodate the standing figures who might wish to see and could not move from their pedestals. And surmounting an isolated spindle, three hundred feet from the eye and at the same elevation, yet two hundred feet from the bottom, a tiny, yellow pine tree, like a giant feather in a feminine hat, waves in glorified, if uncertain, existence. In the newer, and more circular amphitheatres, a honey- combing or selective erosion has left sunless alleyways a few feet wide and around two hundred feet in depth, radiating from the rim to a central "echorium," if a word may be coined from the phenomenon observed; and the bottom regions of this laby- rinth lay in almost perpetual night or twilight. On top of columns and narrow pier-like walls there are many insecurely balanced rocks, as if left there playfully on top of one another two or three deep, one hundred and fifty or — two hundred feet from the shadowy bottoms tricks of the world's workmen in a mischievous mood. Too soon the sun kisses the winter grazing lands of the Wah Weap a good afternoon, and then a good evening; and, after gilding the tops of the Temple's highest spires, a good night to all. Feminine figures that looked up and smiled all day, droop in solemnity as the evening shadows come; and the child rejoicing at her side enacts the "Baby's Prayer at Twi- light." Music that filled the day breezes, across the glittering abysses, become the duller dying notes of the night —all so very like the temporary separation of the honeymooners, to strengthen the bond of affection in silent contemplation. The Forest Service has built six thousand feet of foot-trails through the more scenic of the Temple's ways, and developed a supply of drinking water. Arrangements have also been made for campers, even the Wylie Way permanent camps for the summer; and with an easy automobile road through Red Canyon to the rim, only eighteen miles from the Salt Lake-to-Grand Canyon highway, due east from a point seven miles south of Panguitch, Garfield county, this new-old feature of a world in the making is unveiled.