Everglades National Park, Fla. -- The beauty lies beyond the saw grass.

At first view the land stretches flat, monotonously so, toward the horizon where the sky seems as white and brilliant as the day's light. And the spectrum of colors in this vast wetland mimics the blandness of a Western prairie.

This national treasure doesn't soar into a cobalt blue sky like the burnished, sandstone minarets of Bryce Canyon in Utah. Nor does it hiss steam, spit fire and heave lava into the swirling blue Pacific on the command of a Hawaiian goddess in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

No, this land the Indians called "Pa-hay-okee" (grassy water) holds its beauty close -- in the crook of a mangrove, under the surface of a slough, amid the willow thicket that rises from the muck and mud of the Everglades.

Along the southeastern edge of the park, where visitors can stroll along a boardwalk through a saw grass prairie, walk in a slash pine forest or wander on a hammock -- an island of trees -- the secrets of this unadorned landscape unfold. Those who meander here must be patient, observant and studious to appreciate the Glades' strange treasures.

They must peer in the still brown water of Taylor Slough to spy a leopard-spotted Florida gar or loggerhead turtle swimming beneath white string lilies and purple pickerelweed.

They must tarry before a gumbo limbo tree to notice the tree snail, its white-and-black-striped shell fastened to a gray branch. And they must pause long enough beside a Pond Apple tree to read the small placard that reveals its curiousity: The wood is buoyant (it is also known as corkwood), and its yellow fruit is edible (although it tastes like turpentine).

The whimsy of an airplant (a sprig of green that appears to be grafted to a tree trunk but gleans its nourishment from the rain and air) will delight you.

The roots of a toppled mahogany tree -- spreading like an intricate wrought-iron fence -- will appeal to your sense of the esthetic.

A grunting sound rises from the tall, prickly-edged saw grass -- the pig frogs, of course.

And if a child happens to cry out, "Daddy, look, look, an alligator!" -- as one toddler did on my recent visit -- don't be surprised to find a reptile not just in the swamp but slinking across a pedestrian path to reach his favorite watering hole.

In 1947, the year the federal government designated the Everglades a national park, conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote: "It will be the only national park in which wild-life, the crocodiles, the trees, the orchids, will be more important than the sheer geology of the place."

The fate of that wildlife, as Mrs. Douglas so eloquently explained in her book, "The Everglades: River of Grass," depends on the integrity of that geology. Back then, Mrs. Douglas declared, "The Everglades is dying." The assertion has been often repeated in the decades since as development, agriculture and government flood control policies eroded this one-of-a-kind watershed and conservationists and environmentalists fought to protect it.

Now, after years of political debates, court challenges and farm runoff pollution, relief is on the way for the beleaguered Everglades. With the passage last month of the Everglades Forever Act, Florida has committed itself to a $685 million restoration of this fragile ecosystem.

A third of the cost of the project will be borne by sugar and vegetable growers, the source of pollutants that have contributed to the destruction of thousands of acres of Everglades and a steady decline in its inhabitants. It is an ambitious project that seeks to undo what humans have done in the name of progress.

A subtropical landscape that never rises more than 8 feet above sea level, the Glades is a unique ecosystem of freshwater lakes and rivers fed only by rain. It is a 50-mile wide stream of water that flows south 100 feet a day to the Gulf of Mexico. Here, where Indians plied their speedy canoes before Spanish explorers sought to claim the land and moonshiners hid their stills during Prohibition, the Glades system stretches from the Kissimmee River and Lake Okeechobee in central Florida to Florida Bay at the state's southern tip.

Its most precious asset is water. The Glades is the primary source of water for southern Florida.

Quenching that thirst through a 1,400-mile system of dikes and canals has in time threatened the supply. The original wetlands, stretching 4 million acres, has been shrunk in half. Of the more than 2 million birds that waded in Glade waters, no more than 60,000 remain. Snail kites and the Cape Sable Seaside sparrow, the Florida panther and American alligator have also decreased in numbers, their feeding and breeding grounds diminished.

But 1994 is shaping up to be the year of the Everglades. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt singled it out as a priority, and the Clinton administration hopes to use the restoration project as a model for saving whole ecosystems. When Gov. Lawton Chiles signed into law the landmark bill to save the Glades, Mr. Babbitt was at his side, standing on a boardwalk in the park. "An extraordinary moment," Mr. Chiles said then, according to news reports.

An extraordinary moment that has set in motion an extraordinary task:

To reclaim some 40,000 acres of land and return them to marshland that will filter out the polluting nutrients that wash off sugar cane and vegetable fields, to increase the water flow in the Glades by 28 percent and coincide its run with that of nature and to introduce new regulations geared to a total cleanup of the water by 2006.

The sugar and agricultural industry must pay $12 million a year for the next 20 years to help defray the cost of the project -- an amount that some critics have charged is too cheap.

As part of their property taxes, South Floridians will pay $22 million per year for 10 years -- about $9 to $10 a year on average for a local homeowner, according to David Guest, of the Sierra Club's Legal Defense Fund. The remainder of the project's cost will be covered by state conservation funds and federal money.

Despite the state's commitment, there are some who remain unhappy with the pace and cost of the restoration. Some ardent environmentalists wanted the sugar industry to foot the entire bill for the project -- a demand others saw as politically unrealistic.

These same people worry about other issues that may impact on restoration efforts. They include a plan by a prominent Fort Lauderdale businessman to build a sports and entertainment complex on land east of a Glades conservation area, just north of Miami, and a move to build recreational accesses for off-road vehicles into the Glades near the Big Cypress National Preserve that could further imperil the already endangered Florida panther.

At times, the environmentalists' rhetoric sounds harsh and uncompromising. One group termed the restoration project a "Trojan horse, filled with trouble, disguised as a gift."

And yet the last attempt to force a cleanup of the Everglades -- a 1988 lawsuit by the federal government -- dragged on for three years, mired in countersuits and challenges, mediations and settlement discussions. This plan ends that process and also settles 36 outstanding suits filed by farmers in the past.

The restoration of the Everglades is a complex undertaking, one that should proceed with due diligence if the wonders beyond the saw grass are to remain as memorable as this:

A great blue heron rising from the water's edge, its slate wings darkening the sky like a slash of ink.

Ann LoLordo is a reporter for The Baltimore Sun.