At the head of the list stands the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; whether
it is the “greatest wonder of the world” depends a little on our
definition of “wonder.” Possibly it is no more wonderful than the fact
that so tiny a fraction of the people who confess themselves the
smartest in the world have ever seen it. As a people we dodder abroad to
see scenery incomparably inferior.
But beyond peradventure it is the greatest chasm in the world, and the
most superb. Enough globe-trotters have seen it to establish that fact.
Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it
overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after
all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the
critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness
thereof. But I never knew the most self-satisfied veteran traveler to be
disappointed in the Grand Canyon, or to patronize it. On the contrary,
this is the very class of men who can best comprehend it, and I have
seen them fairly break down in its awful presence.
I do not know the Himalayas except by photograph and the testimony of
men who have explored and climbed them, and who found the Grand Canyon
an absolutely new experience. But I know the American continents pretty
well, and have tramped their mountains, including the Andes—the next
highest mountains in the world, after half a dozen of the Himalayas—and
of all the famous quebradas of the Andes there is not one that would
count 5 per cent on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. For all their
25,000-foot peaks, their blue-white glaciers, imminent above the bald
plateau, and green little bolsones (“pocket valleys”) of Chile, Peru,
Bolivia, and Ecuador; for all their tremendous active volcanoes, like
Saugay and Cotopaxi; for all an earthquake activity beside which the
“shake” at Charleston was mere paper-doll play; for all the steepest
gradients in the world (and Peru is the only place in the world where a
river falls 17,000 feet in 100 miles)—in all that marvelous 3,000-mile
procession of giantism there is not one canyon which any sane person
would for an instant compare with that titanic gash that the Colorado
has chiseled through a comparatively flat upland. Nor is there anything
remotely approaching it in all the New World. So much I can say at first
hand. As for the Old World, the explorer who shall find a gorge there
one-half as great will win undying fame.
The quebrada of the Apu-Rimac is a marvel of the Andes, with its
vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand
Canyon of the Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the
mountains. The Franconia and White Mountain notches in New Hampshire are
beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world,
each in its way. But if all of these were hung up on the opposite wall
of the Grand Canyon from you the chances are fifty to one that you could
not tell t’other from which, nor any of them from the hundreds of other
canyons which rib that vast vertebrate gorge. If the falls of Niagara
were installed in the Grand Canyon between your visits and you knew it
by the newspapers—next time you stood on that dizzy rimrock you would
probably need good field-glasses and much patience before you could
locate that cataract which in its place looks pretty big. If Mount
Washington were plucked up bodily by the roots—not from where you see
it, but from sea-level—and carefully set down in the Grand Canyon, you
probably would not notice it next morning, unless its dull colors
distinguished it in that innumerable congress of larger and painted
giants.
All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be
said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand Canyon. But
I fancy there is no standard adjustable to the human mind. You may
compare all you will—eloquently and from wide experience, and at last
all similes fail. The Grand Canyon is just the Grand Canyon, and that is
all you can say. I never have seen anyone who was prepared for it. I
never have seen anyone who could grasp it in a week’s hard exploration;
nor anyone, except some rare Philistine, who could even think he had
grasped it. I have seen people rave over it; better people struck dumb
with it, even strong men who cried over it; but I have never yet seen
the man or woman that _expected_ it.
It adds seriously to the scientific wonder and the universal
impressiveness of this unparalleled chasm that it is not in some
stupendous mountain range, but in a vast, arid, lofty floor of nearly
100,000 square miles—as it were, a crack in the upper story of the
continent. There is no preparation for it. Unless you had been told, you
would no more dream that out yonder amid the pines the flat earth is
slashed to its very bowels, than you would expect to find an iceberg in
Broadway. With a very ordinary running jump from the spot where you get
your first glimpse of the canyon you could go down 2,000 feet without
touching. It is sudden as a well.
But it is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 feet
deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with
hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not
one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such
color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the
Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give
you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the
great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new
ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. It is like a
dissection of the whole cosmogony. And the purple shadows, the dazzling
lights, the thunderstorms and snowstorms, the clouds and the rainbows
that shift and drift in that vast subterranean arena below your feet!
And amid those enchanted towers and castles which the vastness of the
scale leads you to call “rocks,” but which are in fact as big above the
river-bed as the Rockies from Denver, and bigger than Mount Washington
from Fabyan’s or the Glen!
The Grand Canyon country is not only the hugest, but the most varied and
instructive example on earth of one of the chief factors of
earth-building—erosion. It is the mesa country—the Land of Tables.
Nowhere else on the footstool is there such an example of deep-gnawing
water or of water high-carving. The sandstone mesas of the Southwest,
the terracing of canyon walls, the castellation, battlementing, and
cliff-making, the cutting down of a whole landscape except its
precipitous islands of flat-topped rock, the thin lava table-cloths on
tables 100 feet high—these are a few of the things which make the
Southwest wonderful alike to the scientist and the mere sight-seer.
That the canyon is not “too hard” is perhaps sufficiently indicated by
the fact that I have taken thither ladies and children and men in their
seventies, when the easiest way to get there was by a 70-mile stage
ride, and that at six years old my little girl walked all the way from
rim to bottom of canyon and came back on a horse the same day, and was
next morning ready to go on a long tramp along the rim.
[Illustration: Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody.
The North Wall from Grand Scenic Divide.]
[Illustration: Uncaptioned vista]