Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/465

Rh the embrace of tall and bald-headed hills and mountains, whose monarch was Nebo of the jagged cone. Where the wind current sets there are patches of white sand strewn with broken shells and dried water-weed. Near Pelican Point, a long, projecting rocky spit, there is a fine feeding-ground for geese and ducks, and swimmers and divers may always be seen dotting the surface. On the south rises a conspicuous buttress of black rock, and thirty miles off we could see enormous dust columns careering over the plain. The western part of the valley, cut with suncracks and nullahs, and dotted with boulders, shelves gradually upward from the selvage of the lake to small divides and dwarf-hill ranges, black with cedar-bush, and traversed only by wood roads. On the east is the best wheat country in this part of the Territory; it is said to produce 106 bushels per acre.

After seventeen miles we crossed Jordan Bridge, another rickety affair, for which, being Mormon property, we paid 50 cents; had we been Saints the expense would have been one half. Two more miles led us to Lehi, a rough miniature of Great Salt Lake City, in which the only decent house was the bishop's; in British India it would have been the collector and magistrate's. My companions pointed out to me a hut in which an apostate Mormon's throat had been cut by blackened faces. It is gratifying to observe that throughout the United States, as in the Old Country, all historical interest pales before a barbarous murder. As we advanced a wall of rock lay before us; the strata were in confusion as if a convulsion had lately shuddered through their frame, and tumbled fragments cumbered the base, running up by precipitous ascents to the middle heights. The colors were as grotesque: the foreground was a mass of emerald cane, high and bushy; beyond it, the near distance was pink with the beautiful bloom most unpoetically termed "hogweed," and azure with a growth like the celebrated blue-grass of Kentucky; while the wall itself was a bloodstone dark green with cedar—which, 100 feet tall, was dwarfed to an inch—and red stained with autumnal maple, and below and around the brightest yellow of the faded willow formed the bezel, a golden rim.

Two miles and a half from Lehi led us to American Fork, a soft sweet spring of snow-water, with dark shells adhering to white stones, and a quantity of trout swimming the limpid wave. The bridge was rickety and loose planked—in fact, the worst I ever saw in the United States, where, as a rule, the country bridges can never be crossed without fear and trembling; the moderate toll was $1 both ways. Three miles and a half more placed us at Battle Creek, where in 1853 the Yuta Indians fled precipitately from a Mormon charge. Six miles over a dusty beach conducted us to the mouth of the kanyon, a brown tract crossed by a dusty road and many a spring, and showing the base of the opposite wall encumbered with degraded masses, superimposed upon