“Utah”

“Dusk had begun to settle as they arrived and it obscured in shadow three-quarters of their view of the great aperture. Opaque were the monstrous piles of boulders rising all around them: some light gray, others blue gray, but most, rusted orange. So numerous were these rocks and so high their mounds that they might have been the remains of the collapse of heaven’s own cathedrals. But though these shadowed stones got the boys’ notice, what they saw in the remaining light, to their right and in the distance, astonished them. They saw directly above them on the right a formation that looked like the angry mouth of a beast, whose face first protruded like the snout of a crocodile but then rose in the rear to a forehead like that of gigantic man with a single down-bent eye. A monolith formed an ear on the side of this creature’s skull and triangular pointed stones served as its teeth. The beast’s forehead caught the full glare of the sun and shone with a light that might have been intelligence. To the left of the crocodile-man, the mountain, bathed in softer light, shone with a grayish-peach color, warm and soft. Here spread a sleigh-shaped formation, which could easily have been made of clay. Its sides had been decorated with vertical channels, seemingly by an artisan of Titanic dimensions who had run his fingers and thumb down the surface of the clay to dig shallower and deeper, narrower and wider troughs. On top of the sleigh, where the seat ought to have been, sat dishes (worthy of Lewis Carroll’s imagination) of various dimensions, all nearly perfect in their roundness. But the finest visual treats were those furthest removed from the travelers’ point of vantage. In the distance, shimmering in that soft, other-worldly light which dusk sometimes brings, gleaming in palest silver and chastened white, loomed a vast temple structure part celestial and part chthonic: a building of rock reminiscent of Karnak, Angkor Wat, or Konark in majesty and expanse. This temple, topped by twin domes, could only be entered through a five-story, semicircular-arched gateway. Cylindrical buttresses extended out from its visible side and a flat-pitched roof covered the structure’s far end. Graceful twin columns climbed up the building’s left side. And an unblemished sheet of sky, of the palest gray imaginable, backdropped the colossal creation.”