The north side of the canyon has been much more deeply and
elaborately carved than the south side; most of the great
architectural features are on the north side--the huge temples and
fortresses and amphitheatres. The strata dip very gently to the
north and northeast, while the slope of the surface is to the south
and southeast. This has caused the drainage from the great northern
plateaus to flow into the canyon and thus cut and carve the north
side as we behold it.
The visitor standing upon the south side looks across the great
chasm upon the bewildering maze of monumental forms, some of them as
suggestive of human workmanship as anything in nature well can be,
--crumbling turrets and foundations, forms as distinctly square as
any work of man's hands, vast fortress-like structures with salients
and entering angles and wing walls resisting the siege of time, huge
pyramidal piles rising story on story, three thousand feet or more
above their foundations, each successive story or superstructure
faced by a huge vertical wall which rises from a sloping talus that
connects it with the story next below. The slopes or taluses
represent the softer rock, the vertical walls the harder layers.
Usually four or five of these receding stories make up each temple
or pyramid. Some of the larger structures show all the strata from
the cap of light Carboniferous limestone at the top to the gray
Cambrian sandstone at the bottom. From others, such as the Temple of
Isis, all the upper formations are gone with a pile of disintegrated
red sandstone, like a mass of brick dust on the top where the
fragment of the old red wall made its last stand. In those masses,
which are still crowned with the light gray limestone, one sees how
surely the process of disintegration is going on by the fragments
and debris of light gray rock, like the chips of giant workmen, that
strew the deeper-colored slopes below them. These fragments fade out
as the eye drops down the slopes, as if they had melted like bits of
ice. Indeed, the melting of ice and the dissolution of a rock do not
differ much except that one is very rapid and the other infinitely
slow. In time (not man's time, but the Lord's time), all these light
masses that cap the huge temples will be weathered away, yea, and
all the vast red layers beneath them, and the huge structures will
be slowly consumed by time. The Colorado River will carry their
ashes to the sea, and where they once stood will be seen gray,
desert-like plateaus. Their outlines now stand out like skeletons
from which the flesh has been removed--sharp, angular, obtrusive,
but bound together as by ligaments of granite. The tooth of time
gnaws at them day and night and has been gnawing for thousands of
centuries, so that in some cases only their stumps remain. From the
Temple of Isis and the Tomb of Odin the two or three upper stories
are gone.
On the next page is the ground plan of the Temple of Isis, about
twenty-five hundred feet high. The first story is about a thousand
feet; the second, three hundred and fifty feet; the third, one
hundred and fifty feet; the fourth, five hundred feet; and the
fifth, five hundred feet. The finish at the top shows as a heavy
crumbling wall, probably one hundred feet or more high. How the mass
seems to be resisting the siege of time, throwing out its salients
here and there, and meeting the onset of the foes like a military
engineer.
The pyramidal form of these rock-masses is accounted for by the fact
that they were carved out from the top downward, and that each
successive story is vastly older than the one immediately beneath
it. The erosive forces have been working whole geologic ages longer
on the top layer of rock than on the bottom layer; hence the topmost
ones are entirely gone or else reduced to small dimensions. But what
feature or quality of the rock it is that lends itself so readily or
so inevitably to these architectural forms--the four square
foundations, the end pilasters and balustrades, and so on--is to me
not so clear. The peculiar rectangular jointings, the alternation of
soft and hard layers, the nearly horizontal strata, and other
things, no doubt, enter into the problem. Many of these features are
found in our older geology of the East, as in the Catskills
--horizontal strata, hard and soft layers alternating, but with the
vertical jointing less pronounced; hence the Catskills have few
canon-like valleys, though there are here and there huge gashes
through the mountains that give a canon effect, and there are
gigantic walls high up on the face of some of the mountains that
suggest one side of a mighty canon. In the climate of the Catskills
the rock-masses of the Colorado would crumble much more rapidly than
they do here. The lines of many of these natural temples or
fortresses are still more lengthened and attenuated than those of
the Temple of Isis, appearing like mere skeletons of their former
selves. The forms that weather out the formation above this, the
Permian, appear to be more rotund, and tend more to domes and
rounded hills.
One of the most surprising features of the Grand canon is its
cleanness--its freedom from debris. It is a home of the gods, swept
and garnished; no litter or confusion or fragments of fallen and
broken rocky walls anywhere. Those vast sloping taluses are as clean
as a meadow; rarely at the foot of the huge vertical walls do you
see a fragment of fallen rock. It is as if the processes of erosion
and degradation were as gentle as the dews and the snows, and carved
out this mighty abyss grain by grain, which has probably been the
case. That much of this red sandstone, from the amount of iron it
contains, or from some other cause, disintegrates easily and
rapidly, is very obvious. Looking down from Hopi Point upon a vast
ridge called the "Man-of-War," one sees on the top, where once there
must have been a huge wall of rock, a long level area of red soil
that suggests a garden, the more so because it is regularly divided
up into sections by straight lines of huge stone placed as if by the
hands of man.
One's sense of the depths of the canyon is so great that it almost
makes one dizzy to see the little birds fly out over it, or plunge
down into it. One seems to fear that they too will get dizzy and
fall to the bottom. We watched a line of tourists on mules creeping
along the trail across the inner plateau, and the unaided eye had
trouble to hold them; they looked like little red ants. The eye has
more difficulty in estimating sizes and distances beneath it than
when they are above or on a level with it, because it is so much
less familiar with depth than with height or lateral dimensions.
Another remarkable and unexpected feature of the canyon is its look
of ordered strength. Nearly all the lines are lines of greatest
strength. The prevailing profile line everywhere is that shown
herewith. The upright lines represent lines of cyclopean masonry,
and the slant is the talus that connects them, covered with a short,
sage-colored growth of some kind, and as soft to the eye as the turf
of our fields. The simple, strong structural lines assert themselves
everywhere, and give that look of repose and security characteristic
of the scene. The rocky forces always seem to retreat in good order
before the onslaught of time; there is neither rout nor confusion;
everywhere they present a calm upright front to the foe. And the
fallen from their ranks, where are they? A cleaner battlefield
between the forces of nature one rarely sees.
The weaker portions are, of course, constantly giving way. The
elements incessantly lay siege to these fortresses and take
advantage of every flaw or unguarded point, so that what stands has
been seven times, yea, seventy times seven times tested, and hence
gives the impression of impregnable strength. The angles and curves,
the terraces and foundations, seem to be the work of some master
engineer, with only here and there a toppling rock.
I was puzzled to explain to myself the reason of a certain friendly
and familiar look which the great abyss had for me. One sees or
feels at a glance that it was not born of the throes and convulsions
of nature--of earthquake shock or volcanic explosion. It does not
suggest the crush of matter and the wreck of worlds. Clearly it is
the work of the more gentle and beneficent forces. This probably
accounts for the friendly look. Some of the inner slopes and
plateaus seemed like familiar ground to me: I must have played upon
them when a school-boy. Bright Angel Creek, for some inexplicable
reason, recalled a favorite trout-stream of my native hills, and the
old Cambrian plateau that edges the inner chasm, as we looked down
upon it from nearly four thousand feet above, looked like the brown
meadow where we played ball in the old school-days, friendly,
tender, familiar, in its slopes and terraces, in its tints and
basking sunshine, but grand and awe-inspiring in its depths, its
huge walls, and its terrific precipices.
The geologists are agreed that the canyon is only of yesterday in
geologic time,--the Middle Tertiary,--and yet behold the duration of
that yesterday as here revealed, probably a million years or more!
We can no more form any conception of such time than we can of the
size of the sun or of the distance of the fixed stars.
The forces that did all this vast delving and sculpturing--the air,
the rains, the frost, the sunshine--are as active now as they ever
were; but their activity is a kind of slumbering that rarely makes a
sign. Only at long intervals is the silence of any part of the
profound abyss broken by the fall of loosened rocks or sliding
talus. We ourselves saw where a huge splinter of rock had recently
dropped from the face of the cliff. In time these loosened masses
disappear, as if they melted like ice. A city not made with hands,
but as surely not eternal in the earth! In our humid and severe
Eastern climate, frost and ice and heavyrains working together, all
these architectural forms would have crumbled long ago, and fertile
fields or hill-slopes would have taken their place. In the older
Hawaiian Islands, which probably also date from Tertiary times, the
rains have carved enormous canons and amphitheatres out of the hard
volcanic rock, in some places grinding the mountains to such a thin
edge that a man may literally sit astride them, each leg pointing
into opposite valleys. In the next geologic age, the temples and
monuments of the Grand Canon will have largely disappeared, and the
stupendous spectacle will be mainly a thing of the past.
It seems to take millions of years to tame a mountain, to curb its
rude, savage power, to soften its outlines, and bring fertility out
of the elemental crudeness and barrenness. But time and the gentle
rains of heaven will do it, as they have done it in the East, and as
they are fast doing it in the West.
An old guide with whom I talked, who had lived in and about the
canon for twenty-six years, said, "While we have been sitting here,
the canon has widened and deepened"; which was, of course, the
literal truth, the mathematical truth, but the widening and
deepening could not have been apprehended by human sense.
Our little span of human life is far too narrow for us to be a
witness of any of the great earth changes. These changes are so
slow,--oh, so slow,--and human history is so brief. So far as we are
concerned, the gods of the earth sit in council behind closed doors.
All the profound, formative, world-shaping forces of nature go on in
a realm that we can reach only through our imaginations. They so far
transcend our human experiences that it requires an act of faith to
apprehend them. The repose of the hills and the mountains, how
profound! yet they may be rising or sinking before our very eyes,
and we detect no sign. Only on exceptional occasions, during
earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, is their dreamless slumber rudely
disturbed.
Geologists tell us that from the great plateau in which the Grand
Canon is cut, layers of rock many thousands of feet thick were cut
away before the canon was begun.
Starting from the high plateau of Utah, and going south toward the
canon, we descend a grand geologic stairway, every shelf or tread of
which consists of different formations fifty or more miles broad,
from the Eocene, at an altitude of over ten thousand feet at the
start, across the Cretaceous, the Jurassic, the Triassic, the
Permian, to the Carboniferous, which is the bottom or landing of the
Grand Canon plateau at an altitude of about five thousand feet. Each
step terminates more or less abruptly, the first by a drop of eight
hundred feet, ornamented by rows of square obelisks and pilasters of
uniform pattern and dimension, "giving the effect," says Major
Dutton, "of a gigantic colonnade from which the entablature has been
removed or has fallen in ruins."
The next step, or platform, the Cretaceous, slopes down gradually or
dies out on the step beneath it; then comes the Jurassic, which ends
in white sandstone cliffs several hundred feet high; then the
Triassic, which ends in the famous vermilion cliffs thousands of
feet high, most striking in color and in form; then the Permian
tread, which also ends in striking cliffs, with their own style of
color and architecture; and, lastly, the great Carboniferous
platform in which the canon itself is carved. Now, all these various
strata above the canon, making at one time a thickness of over a
mile, were worn away in Pliocene times, before the cutting of the
Grand Canon began. Had they remained, and been cut through, we
should have had a chasm two miles deep instead of one mile.
The cutting power of a large, rapid volume of water, like the
Colorado, charged with sand and gravel, is very great. According to
Major Dutton, in the hydraulic mines of California, the escaping
water has been known to cut a chasm from twelve to twenty feet deep
in hard basaltic rock, in a single year. This is, of course,
exceptional, but there have, no doubt, been times when the Colorado
cut downward very rapidly. The enormous weathering of its side walls
is to me the more wonderful, probably because the forces that have
achieved this task are silent and invisible, and, so far as our
experience goes, so infinitely slow in their action. The river is a
tremendous machine for grinding and sawing and transporting, but the
rains and the frost and the air and the sunbeams smite the rocks as
with weapons of down, and one is naturally incredulous as to their
destructive effects.
Some of the smaller rivers in the plateau region flow in very deep
but very narrow canons. The rocks being harder and more homogeneous,
the weathering has been slight. The meteoric forces have not taken a
hand in the game. Thus the Parunuweap Canon is only twenty to
thirty feet wide, but from six hundred to fifteen hundred feet deep.
I suppose the slow, inappreciable erosion to which the old guide
alluded would have cut the canon since Middle Tertiary times. The
river, eating downward at the rate of one sixteenth of an inch a
year, would do it in about one million years. At half that rate it
would do it in double that time. In the earlier part of its history,
when the rainfall was doubtless greater, and the river fuller, the
erosion must have been much more rapid than it is at present. The
widening of the canon was doubtless a slower process than the
downward cutting. But, as I have said, the downward cutting would
tend to check itself from age to age, while the widening process
would go steadily forward. Hence, when we look into the great abyss,
we have only to remember the enormous length of time that the aerial
and subaerial forces have been at work to account for it.
Two forces, or kinds of forces, have worked together in excavating
the canon: the river, which is the primary factor, and the meteoric
forces, which may be called the secondary, as they follow in the
wake of the former. The river starts the gash downward, then the
aerial forces begin to eat into the sides. Acting alone, the river
would cut a trench its own width, and were the rocks through which
it saws one homogeneous mass, or of uniform texture and hardness,
the width of the trench would probably have been very uniform and
much less than it is now. The condition that has contributed to its
great width is the heterogeneity of the different formations--some
hard and some soft. The softer bands, of course, introduce the
element of weakness. They decay and crumble the more rapidly, and
thus undermine the harder bands overlying them, which, by reason of
their vertical fractures, break off and fall to the bottom, where
they are exposed to the action of floods and are sooner or later
ground up in the river's powerful maw. Hence the recession of the
banks of the canon has gone steadily on with the downward cutting of
the river. Where the rock is homogeneous, as it is in the inner
chasm of the dark gneiss, the widening process seems to have gone on
much more slowly. Geologists account for the great width of the main
chasm when compared with the depth, on the theory that the forces
that work laterally have been more continuously active than has the
force that cuts downward. There is convincing evidence that the
whole region has been many times lifted up since the cutting began,
so that the river has had its active and passive stages. As its
channel approached the sea level, its current would be much less
rapid, and the downward cutting would practically cease, till the
section was elevated again. But all the time the forces working
laterally would be at work without interruption, and would thus gain
on their checked brethren of the river bottom.
There is probably another explanation of what we see here. Apart
from the mechanical weathering of the rocks as a result of the arid
climate, wherein rapid and often extreme changes of temperature take
place, causing the surface of the rocks to flake or scale off, there
has doubtless been unusual chemical weathering, and this has been
largely brought about by the element of iron that all these rocks
possess. Their many brilliant colors are imparted to them by the
various compounds of iron which enter into their composition. And
iron, though the symbol of hardness and strength, is an element of
weakness in rocks, as it causes them to oxidize or disintegrate more
rapidly. In the marble canon, where apparently the rock contains no
iron, the lateral erosion has been very little, though the river has
cut a trench as deep as it has in other parts of its course.
How often I thought during those days at the canon of the geology of
my native hills amid the Catskills, which show the effects of
denudation as much older than that shown here as this is older than
the washout in the road by this morning's shower! The old red
sandstone in which I hoed corn as a farm-boy dates back to Middle
Palaeozoic time, or to the spring of the great geologic year, while
the canon is of the late autumn. Could my native hills have replied
to my mute questionings, they would have said: "We were old, old,
and had passed through the canon stage long before the Grand Canon
was born. We have had all that experience, and have forgotten it
ages ago. No vestiges of our canons remain. They have all been worn
down and obliterated by the strokes of a hand as gentle as that of a
passing cloud. Where they were, are now broad, fertile valleys, with
rounded knolls and gentle slopes, and the sound of peaceful
husbandry. The great ice sheet rubbed us and ploughed us, but our
contours were gentle and rounded aeons before that event. When the
Grand Canon is as old as we are, all its superb architectural
features will have long since disappeared, its gigantic walls will
have crumbled, and rolling plains and gentle valleys will have taken
its place." All of which seems quite probable. With time enough, the
gentle forces of air and water will surely change the whole aspect
of this tremendous chasm.
On the second day we made the descent into the canon on mule-back.
There is always satisfaction in going to the bottom of things. Then
we wanted to get on more intimate terms with the great abyss, to
wrestle with it, if need be, and to feel its power, as well as to
behold it. It is not best always to dwell upon the rim of things or
to look down upon them from afar. The summits are good, but the
valleys have their charm, also; even the valley of humiliation has
its lessons. At any rate, four of us were unanimous in our desire to
sound that vast profound on mule-back, trusting that the return trip
would satisfy our "climbing" aspirations, as it did.
It is quite worth while to go down into the canon on mule-back, if
only to fall in love with a mule, and to learn what a sure-footed,
careful, and docile creature, when he is on his good behavior, a
mule can be. My mule was named "Johnny," and there was soon a good
understanding between us. I quickly learned to turn the whole
problem of that perilous descent over to him. He knew how to take
the sharp turns and narrow shelves of that steep zigzag much better
than I did. I do not fancy that the thought of my safety was
"Johnny's" guiding star; his solicitude struck nearer home than
that. There was much ice and snow on the upper part of the trail,
and only those slender little legs of "Johnny's" stood between me
and a tumble of two or three thousand feet. How cautiously he felt
his way with his round little feet, as, with lowered head, he seemed
to be scanning the trail critically! Only when he swung around the
sharp elbows of the trail did his forefeet come near the edge of the
brink. Only once or twice at such times, as we hung for a breath
above the terrible incline, did I feel a slight shudder. One of my
companions, who had never before been upon an animal's back, so fell
in love with her "Sandy" that she longed for a trunk big enough in
which to take him home with her.
It was more than worth while to make the descent to traverse that
Cambrian plateau, which from the rim is seen to flow out from the
base of the enormous cliffs to the brink of the inner chasm, looking
like some soft, lavender-colored carpet or rug. I had never seen the
Cambrian rocks, the lowest of the stratified formations, nor set my
foot upon Cambrian soil. Hence a new experience was promised me.
Rocky layers probably two or three miles thick had been worn away
from the old Cambrian foundations, and when I looked down upon that
gently undulating plateau, the thought of the eternity of time which
it represented tended quite as much to make me dizzy as did the drop
of nearly four thousand feet. We found it gravelly and desert-like,
covered with cacti, low sagebrush, and other growths. The dim trail
led us to its edge, where we could look down into the
twelve-hundred-foot V-shaped gash which the river had cut into the
dark, crude-looking Archaean rock. How distinctly it looked like a
new day in creation where the horizontal, yellowish-gray beds of the
Cambrian were laid down upon the dark, amorphous, and twisted older
granite! How carefully the level strata had been fitted to the
shapeless mass beneath it! It all looked like the work of a master
mason; apparently you could put the point of your knife where one
ended and the other began. The older rock suggested chaos and
turmoil; the other suggested order and plan, as if the builder had
said, "Now upon this foundation we will build our house." It is an
interesting fact, the full geologic significance of which I suppose
I do not appreciate, that the different formations are usually
marked off from one another in just this sharp way, as if each one
was, indeed, the work of a separate day of creation. Nature appears
at long intervals to turn over a new leaf and start a new chapter in
her great book. The transition from one geologic age to another
appears to be abrupt: new colors, new constituents, new qualities
appear in the rocks with a suddenness hard to reconcile with Lyell's
doctrine of uniformitarianism, just as new species appear in the
life of the globe with an abruptness hard to reconcile with Darwin's
slow process of natural selection. Is sudden mutation, after all,
the key to all these phenomena?
We ate our lunch on the old Cambrian table, placed there for us so
long ago, and gazed down upon the turbulent river hiding and
reappearing in its labyrinthian channel so far below us. It is worth
while to make the descent in order to look upon the river which has
been the chief quarryman in excavating the canon, and to find how
inadequate it looks for the work ascribed to it. Viewed from where
we sat, I judged it to be forty or fifty feet broad, but I was
assured that it was between two and three hundred feet. Water and
sand are ever symbols of instability and inconstancy, but let them
work together, and they saw through mountains, and undermine the
foundations of the hills.
It is always worth while to sit or kneel at the feet of grandeur, to
look up into the placid faces of the earth gods and feel their
power, and the tourist who goes down into the canon certainly has
this privilege. We did not bring back in our hands, or in our hats,
the glory that had lured us from the top, but we seemed to have been
nearer its sources, and to have brought back a deepened sense of the
magnitude of the forms, and of the depth of the chasm which we had
heretofore gazed upon from a distance. Also we had plucked the
flower of safety from the nettle danger, always an exhilarating
enterprise.
In climbing back, my eye, now sharpened by my geologic reading,
dwelt frequently and long upon the horizon where that cross-bedded
Carboniferous sandstone joins the Carboniferous limestone above it.
How much older the sandstone looked! I could not avoid the
impression that its surface must have formed a plane of erosion ages
and ages before the limestone had been laid down upon it.
We had left plenty of ice and snow at the top, but in the bottom we
found the early spring flowers blooming, and a settler at what is
called the Indian Gardens was planting his garden. Here I heard the
song of the canon wren, a new and very pleasing bird-song to me. I
think our dreams were somewhat disturbed that night by the
impressions of the day, but our day-dreams since that time have at
least been sweeter and more comforting, and I am sure that the
remainder of our lives will be the richer for our having seen the
Grand Canon.