Before me lies a thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a
woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south. It
was once soft clay. It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean
rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to
flow. More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock. Many
strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of
beauty was buried thousands of feet deep. The strata were tilted
variously and abraded wondrously, for our earth has been treated very
much as the fair-armed bread-maker treats the lump of dough she doubles
and kneads on the molding board. Other rocks of a much harder nature,
composed in part of the shells of inexpressible multitudes of Ocean's
infusoria, were laid down from the superincumbent sea. Still the
delicate ripple marks were preserved. Nature's vast library was being
formed, and on this scrap of a leaf not a letter was lost.
Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white. It once flowed
as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock
now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain. The water
gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops. Between
the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance
of more than a mile of impenetrable rock. How did they ever get
together? Let us see.
After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this
vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed
round with mountains. Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed
in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way
along a few hundred miles. Into this crack rushed a great river,
perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake
may be a little remnant puddle. These tumultuous waters proceeded to
pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock
deposited between the two stones. There was fall enough to make forty
Niagaras.
I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a
mountain valley. It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a
precipice of one thousand feet. The rock at the bottom was crushed
under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and
every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of
tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the
plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew
three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep.
Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric
Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.
The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand
miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern
border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side
of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to
what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of
work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the
depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths.
Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying
hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say,
half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are
various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular
sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The
outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood
and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the
chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.
We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the
mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the
rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off
whole oceans of rain. The rivers that remained began to cut a much
narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below. From the
great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting
lateral cañons down to the central flow. Between these stand the
little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base.
I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked
leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone
written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of
one formed, eons after, at the top. They be brothers both, formed by
the same forces and for the same end.
Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to
stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done. A whole
day is taken to go down the gorge to the river. It takes seven miles
of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over
two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down
thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile. It was
an immense day's work.
The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses
never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn
seen close by from its Hörnli shoulder.
There was the river--a regular freight train, running day and night,
the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the
elevated road of the upper air)--burdened with dissolved rock and earth.
A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed
rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the
sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in
uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it
has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.
In the side cañon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it
was easy to see the work done. Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile
the bottom of a side cañon with every variety of stone, from the wall a
mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate. The next rush of
waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into
the main river. For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of
Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South
Boston Flats. Boston made more land than the city originally
contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these
excavations.
The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty
chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the
next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared
comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty,
eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require
them all.
In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down
this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the
purpose. In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of
it in extremest peril. For weeks there was no possibility of climbing
to the plateau above.
Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at
first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of
color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its
illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years
of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in
the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in
the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you
find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed.
The first sight of the cañon often brings strong men to their knees in
awe and adoration. The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet
deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and
forty. Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer
acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.
The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the
breezy mountain tops." I have seen many sunrises In this world and one
other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for
weeks into its morning sunlight. I knew what to expect. But nature
always surpasses expectations. The sinuosities of the rim sent back
their various colors. A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and
water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of
the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music. As the
world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished,
light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new
creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light"
had been uttered. I had seen it for the first time the night before in
the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed
to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.
One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere. It is well known that
the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky. Blue is the color of the
atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a
jar, it shows its own true color. So, looking into this inconceivable
cañon, the true color came out most beauteously. There was a
background of red and yellowish rocks. These made the cold blue blush
with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish
white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind
it. God was laying the foundation of his perfect city there, and the
light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been
made by the luminousness of Him who is light.
One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and
hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings
there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally
made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama,
parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm.
The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater
things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless
mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the
wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One
should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to
live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more
wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.
The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The
floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the
Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and
sang:
"Perpetual masses here intone,
Uncounted censers swing,
A psalm on every breeze is blown;
The echoing peaks from throne to throne
Greet the indwelling King;
The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
And seraph-tongued are earth and air."