The top of each of these colored steps is a pool of boiling water. Each of these tiny lakes is radiant with lovely hues, and is bordered by a colored coping, resembling a curb of jasper or of porphyry. Yet the thinnest knife-blade can be placed here on the dividing line between vitality and death. The contrast is as sudden and complete as that between the desert and the valley of the Nile. Where Egypt's river ends its overflow the desert sands begin; and on these terraces it is the same. Where the life-giving water fails, the golden colors become ashen. This terraced mountain, therefore, seemed to me like a colossal checker-board, upon whose colored squares, the two great forces, Life and Death, were playing their eternal game. There is a pathos in this evanescent beauty. What lies about us in one place so gray and ghostly was once as bright and beautiful as that which we perceive a hundred feet away. But nothing here retains supremacy. The glory of this century will be the gravestone of the next. Around our feet are sepulchres of vanished splendor. It seems as if the architect were constantly dissatisfied. No sooner has he finished one magnificent structure than he impatiently begins another, leaving the first to crumble and decay. Each new production seems to him the finest; but never reaching his ideal, he speedily abandons it to perish from neglect.
It cannot be said of these terraces that "distance lends enchantment to the view." The nearer you come to them the more beautiful they appear. They even bear the inspection of a magnifying glass, for they are covered with a bead-like ornamentation worthy of the goldsmith's art. In one place, for example, rise pulpits finer than those of Pisa or Siena. Their edges seem to be of purest jasper. They are upheld by tapering shafts resembling richly decorated organ-pipes. From parapets of porphyry hang gold stalactites, side by side with icicles of silver. Moreover, all its marvelous fretwork is distinctly visible, for the light film of water pulsates over it so delicately that it can no more hide the filigree beneath than a thin veil conceals a face.
It is a melancholy fact that were it not for United States troops, these beautiful objects would be mutilated by relic-hunters. Hence, another duty of our soldiers is to watch the formations constantly, lest tourists should break off specimens, and ruin them forever, and lest still more ignoble vandals, whose fingers itch for notoriety, should write upon these glorious works of nature their worthless names, and those of the towns unfortunate enough to have produced them. All possible measures are taken to prevent this vandalism. Thus, every tourist entering the Park must register his name. Most travelers do so, as a matter of course, at the hotels, but even the arrivals of those who come here to camp must be duly recorded at the Superintendent's office, If a soldier sees a name, or even initials, written on the stone, he telephones the fact to the Military Governor. At once the lists are scanned for such a name. If found, the Superintendent wires an order to have the man arrested, and so careful is the search for all defacers, that the offending party is, usually, found before he leaves the Park. Then the Superintendent, like the Mikado, makes the punishment fit the crime. A scrubbing brush and laundry soap are given to the desecrator, and he is made to go back, perhaps forty miles or more, and with his own hands wash away the proofs of his disgraceful vanity. Not long ago a young man was arrested at six o'clock in the morning, made to leave his bed, and march without his breakfast several miles, to prove that he could be as skillful with a brush as with a pencil.