After dinner we went out to see the stars, which are so beautiful in this clear atmosphere, with the Milky Way, a trailing cloud across the sky.
_Tuesday, August 16th. In the train going to Salt Lake City._--We have been spending the day in the Rocky Mountains, amongst some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, awed and struck by the grandeur of the scenes we have passed through.
We began in the early freshness of the morning with a drive up the Cheyenne Pass, a wild gorge, penetrating for some miles into the heart of the mountains. We passed first through prairie fields, where pink anemones, wild larkspur, bluebells, sunflowers, large white poppies, cornflowers, and a delicate pink flower, called here a primrose, grew in wild luxuriance, over a very roughly-laid road, where only a carriage of such light build as ours was could have been driven. The bridges over the many freshets were made of the stems of pine-trees loosely laid together, and as often as the horses stepped on one end the other rose up.
It was a scene of the wildest beauty as we penetrated ever deeper into the contracting gorge. One of the great charms of this range is the rich colour of their red sandstone masses, blackened and weather-stained in parts by the action of centuries. We were surrounded, hemmed in, overhung by those stupendous fragments, and masses of rocks leaning towards each other, and leaving only a narrow streak of sky as a relief to the surrounding gloom, which was heightened by the dark pines that clung and found a footing on every narrow ledge. When we reached the end of the cañon which by this time was so deep and dark as to form only a chasm amongst the rocks, we were fairly spell-bound, breathless almost from the astounding magnificence of the scene before us. Seven waterfalls falling down the face of the black cliff, seven clouds of spray falling one under each other, each into its dark pool below. We climbed up a frail, wooden staircase, hung out from ledges in the rocks, looking into every little hollow, following the fall of the water over each, till we traced it to its source, where it first comes gliding over from the quiet, green pool lying hid in a rocky basin above. This pool takes the reflection of the dark pines on its calm depths.