Stolid, indeed, is he who can front the awful scene and view its
unearthly splendor of color and form without quaking knee or tremulous
breath. An inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires; a whole chaotic
under-world, just emptied of primeval floods and waiting for a new
creative word; eluding all sense of perspective or dimension,
outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of
definite apprehension; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet
spectral as a dream. The beholder is at first unimpressed by any detail;
he is overwhelmed by the _ensemble_ of a stupendous panorama, a thousand
square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he stood
upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in
the plateau, whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of
huge architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with
ornamental devices, festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from
the upper cliffs and painted with every color known to the palette in
pure transparent tones of marvelous delicacy. Never was picture more
harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant
communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a
thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of
Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
The River and the Canyon Wall.]
A canyon, truly, but not after the accepted type. An intricate system of
canyons, rather, each subordinate to the river channel in the midst,
which in its turn is subordinate to the whole effect. That river
channel, the profoundest depth, and actually more than 6,000 feet below
the point of view, is in seeming a rather insignificant trench,
attracting the eye more by reason of its somber tone and mysterious
suggestion than by any appreciable characteristic of a chasm. It is
perhaps five miles distant in a straight line, and its uppermost rims
are nearly 4,000 feet beneath the observer, whose measuring capacity is
entirely inadequate to the demand made by such magnitudes. One can not
believe the distance to be more than a mile as the crow flies, before
descending the wall or attempting some other form of actual measurement.
Mere brain knowledge counts for little against the illusion under which
the organ of vision is here doomed to labor. Yonder cliff, darkening
from white to gray, yellow, and brown as your glance descends, is taller
than the Washington Monument. The Auditorium in Chicago would not cover
one-half its perpendicular span. Yet it does not greatly impress you.
You idly toss a pebble toward it, and are surprised to note how far the
missile falls short. By and by you will learn that it is a good half
mile distant, and when you go down the trail you will gain an abiding
sense of its real proportions. Yet, relatively, it is an unimportant
detail of the scene. Were Vulcan to cast it bodily into the chasm
directly beneath your feet, it would pass for a bowlder, if, indeed, it
were discoverable to the unaided eye.
Yet the immediate chasm itself is only the first step of a long terrace
that leads down to the innermost gorge and the river. Roll a heavy stone
to the rim and let it go. It falls sheer the height of a church or an
Eiffel Tower, according to the point selected for such pastime, and
explodes like a bomb on a projecting ledge. If, happily, any
considerable fragments remain, they bound onward like elastic balls,
leaping in wild parabola from point to point, snapping trees like
straws; bursting, crashing, thundering down the declivities until they
make a last plunge over the brink of a void; and then there comes
languidly up the cliff sides a faint, distant roar, and your bowlder
that had withstood the buffets of centuries lies scattered as wide as
Wycliffe’s ashes, although the final fragment has lodged only a little
way, so to speak, below the rim. Such performances are frequently given
in these amphitheaters without human aid, by the mere undermining of the
rain, or perhaps it is here that Sisyphus rehearses his unending task.
Often in the silence of night some tremendous fragment has been heard
crashing from terrace to terrace with shocks like thunder peal.
The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside
world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can
acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as
broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human
grasp.