II

Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand canon of the Colorado,

if he has kept his eyes and mind open, he is prepared to see

striking and unusual things. But he cannot be fully prepared for

just what he does see, no matter how many pictures of it he may have

seen, or how many descriptions of it he may have read.

A friend of mine who took a lively interest in my Western trip wrote

me that he wished he could have been present with his kodak when we

first looked upon the Grand Canon. Did he think he could have got a

picture of our souls? His camera would have shown him only our

silent, motionless forms as we stood transfixed by that first view

of the stupendous spectacle. Words do not come readily to one's

lips, or gestures to one's body, in the presence of such a scene.

One of my companions said that the first thing that came into her

mind was the old text, "Be still, and know that I am God." To be

still on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the world, and to

feel the surge of solemn and reverential emotions is equally easy;

is, indeed, almost inevitable. The immensity of the scene, its

tranquillity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the monumental

character of its many forms--all these tend to beget in the beholder

an attitude of silent wonder and solemn admiration. I wished at the

moment that we might have been alone with the glorious

spectacle,--that we had hit upon an hour when the public had gone to

dinner. The smoking and joking tourists sauntering along in apparent

indifference, or sitting with their backs to the great geologic

drama, annoyed me. I pity the person who can gaze upon the spectacle

unmoved. Some are actually terrified by it. I was told of a strong

man, an eminent lawyer from a Western city, who literally fell to

the earth at the first view, and could not again be induced to look

upon it. I saw a woman prone upon the ground near the brink at Hopi

Point, weeping silently and long; but from what she afterward told

me I know it was not from terror or sorrow, but from the

overpowering gladness of the ineffable beauty and harmony of the

scene. It moved her like the grandest music. Her inebriate soul

could find relief only in tears.

Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first view that she says she

had to fight against the desperate temptation to fling herself down

into the soft abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the very

beating of her heart had offered to the inviolable solitude. Charles

Dudley Warner said of it, "I experienced for a moment an

indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be

alone in such a presence."

It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a beauty that awakens

a feeling of solemnity and awe. We call it the "Divine Abyss." It

seems as much of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of it,

none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour into it a torrent

of superlatives, is of little avail. My companion came nearer the

mark when she quietly repeated from Revelation, "And he carried me

away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that

great city, the holy Jerusalem." It does, indeed, suggest a far-off,

half-sacred antiquity, some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or

India. We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision, so

foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, and so

surpassingly beautiful.

To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, so unlike everything

one's experience has yielded, and so unlike the results of the usual

haphazard working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not

wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked me what I supposed

did all this. I could even sympathize with the remark of an old

woman visitor who is reported to have said that she thought they had

built the canon too near the hotel. The enormous cleavage which the

canon shows, the abrupt drop from the brink of thousands of feet,

the sheer faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at

first the impression that it is all the work of some titanic

quarryman, who must have removed cubic miles of strata as we remove

cubic yards of earth. Go out to Hopi Point or O'Neil's Point, and,

as you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a blue or

rose-purple gulf opening before you. The solid ground ceases

suddenly, and an aerial perspective, vast and alluring, takes its

place; another heaven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you on

the brink. "Great God!" I can fancy the first beholder of it saying,

"what is this? Do I behold the transfiguration of the earth? Has the

solid ground melted into thin air? Is there a firmament below as

well as above? Has the earth veil at last been torn aside, and the

red heart of the globe been laid bare?" If this first witness was

not at once overcome by the beauty of the earthly revelation before

him, or terrified by its strangeness and power, he must have stood

long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonishment, and thrilled

with delight. He may have seen vast and glorious prospects from

mountaintops, he may have looked down upon the earth and seen it

unroll like a map before him; but he had never before looked into

the earth as through a mighty window or open door, and beheld depths

and gulfs of space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions and

vast perspectives, such as he had seen from mountain-summits, but

with a wealth of color and a suggestion of architectural and

monumental remains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such as

no mountain-view could ever have afforded him. Three features of the

canon strike one at once: its unparalleled magnitude, its

architectural forms and suggestions, and its opulence of color

effects--a chasm nearly a mile deep and from ten to twenty miles

wide, in which Niagara would be only as a picture upon your walls,

in which the Pyramids, seen from the rim, would appear only like

large tents, in which the largest building upon the earth would

dwindle to insignificant proportions. There are amphitheatres and

mighty aisles eight miles long and three or four miles wide and

three or four thousand feet deep. There are room-like spaces eight

hundred feet high; there are well-defined alcoves with openings a

mile wide; there are niches six hundred feet high overhung by arched

lintels; there are pinnacles and rude statues from one hundred to

two hundred feet high. Here I am running at once into allusions to

the architectural features and suggestions of the canon, which must

play a prominent part in all faithful attempts to describe it. There

are huge, truncated towers, vast, horizontal mouldings; there is the

semblance of balustrades on the summit of a noble facade. In one of

the immense halls we saw, on an elevated platform, the outlines of

three enormous chairs, fifty feet or more high, and behind and above

them the suggestion of three more chairs in partial ruin. Indeed,

there is such an opulence of architectural forms in this divine

abyss as one has never before dreamed of seeing wrought by the blind

forces of nature. These forces have here foreshadowed all the

noblest architecture of the world. Many of the vast carved and

ornamental masses which diversify the canon have been fitly named

temples, as Shiva's Temple, a mile high, carved out of the red

Carboniferous limestone, and remarkably symmetrical in its outlines.

Near it is the Temple of Isis, the Temple of Osiris, the Buddha

Temple, the Horus Temple, and the Pyramid of Cheops. Farther to the

east is the Diva Temple, the Brahma Temple, the Temple of Zoroaster,

and the Tomb of Odin. Indeed, everywhere are there suggestions of

temples and tombs, pagodas and pyramids, on a scale that no work of

human hands can rival. "The grandest objects," says Major Dutton,

"are merged in a congregation of others equally grand." With the

wealth of form goes a wealth of color. Never, I venture to say, were

reds and browns and grays and vermilions more appealing to the eye

than they are as they softly glow in this great canyon. The

color-scheme runs from the dark, sombre hue of the gneiss at the

bottom, up through the yellowish brown of the Cambrian layers, and

on up through seven or eight broad bands of varying tints of red and

vermilion, to the broad yellowish-gray at the top.