French expeditioner and artist Louis Delaporte wrote: 'When we emerged from the grove, we beheld one of the strangest phenomena we had ever seen. Two huge walls of dark rock, several hundred meters high, revealed a pass leading to a vast shining plain . About a quarter mile inside and right in the middle, two vertical pillars of rock, like two great candles, rose to a prodigious height . A herd of wild elephants looking not much bigger than sheep beside the huge masses around them, emerged from a thicket and roamed into the plain.'.