It is the product of processes that are entirely explicable — sedimentation, lithification, uplift, erosion, isolation, natural selection.

But the scale of those processes — the two billion years of rock history, the millions of years of evolutionary isolation, the hundreds of millions of years of continental drift that repositioned the very ground on which the ancient sediments were deposited — is so far beyond ordinary human experience that the result looks like something out of a dream or a myth.

The mountain that looks like a fortress built by giants is carved by rain.

The species that look like inhabitants of another world are the products of evolutionary processes operating on organisms that arrived from the lowland forests by the ordinary means of dispersal — wind, water, animals carrying seeds and spores — and then were shaped by isolation into the extraordinary forms they take today.