El Tovar, Grand Canyon, Arizona, September 3: We left Los Angeles
yesterday morning. It was without any regrets that we turned our faces
homeward. California in September has no charms that can be compared
with those of September in Iowa.
From Los Angeles to San Bernardino is a matter of two hours, through
the San Gabriel Valley, one of the famous valleys of the state. We
were rather disappointed. Where we had expected to see an unbroken
succession of cultivated groves and gardens, we found half of the land
still in sage brush. Like most of the far west, the land is cultivated
in spots only. They said there was not enough water for all the fields.
After leaving San Bernardino we went through a mountain pass and
emerged, early in the afternoon, on the fringes of the Mojave desert,
perhaps the dreariest area on the American continent. Hundreds of
miles of utter barrenness! The famous Death Valley, 400 feet below the
top of the ocean, is part of this desert. It is on this journey that
one learns the value of water. Water, the great alchemist, the creator
and sustainer of life. How men and women follow the water, here in the
semi-arid west! There is no place in the mountains where a bit of a
stream trickles down that human beings are not found. A little house, a
little garden, and a cow, all gathered about that bit of water which is
all of life to them. In these regions water is everything and even real
estate men do not sell land, but water. A hot, dusty, disagreeable ride
this is, through the Mojave desert. Nothing of the kind could be worse.
We were favored, too, for all afternoon thunder clouds were toying
with mountain peaks, black clouds and vivid lightning and the deep
reverberations of thunder--all so suggestive of copious falls of water,
but only once did our train succeed in overtaking one of these showers.
And of what use is a shower in a desert?
We retired for the night, after we had passed the Needles, on the
Colorado River, between California and Arizona. When we arose in the
morning we were in a green country again. The desert had faded away and
trees and flowers had come in again. Strange freak of nature, that the
clouds should pass over the intervening desert and drop their moisture
in central Arizona, where July and August are the rainy months of the
year. It was good to see the trees again, the big trees, and the grass
and the flowers in the green fields. Our train reached Williams early
in the morning. From Williams it is sixty miles to the rim of the
Canyon, a side journey which one can make in the comfort of a Pullman
car. I had heard so much about the Grand Canyon that I was afraid to
look at it, though now within a stone’s throw of it--afraid of being
disappointed. The disillusionments had been so many on this western
journey, so many things had proved to be less than they had been
reported in the guide books and in the letters of travelers that I was
minded to save one dreamed of great thing from the wrecks of travel,
at least a little while longer. So we sat down to breakfast first--the
Grand Canyon would wait.
It was a beautiful morning, the heavens filled with sunshine, with just
enough of autumn in it to give it a dreamy effect. Fifty steps from
the hotel brought us to the rim of the canyon. Those fifty steps took
one into a new world. Unlike mountains and oceans, unlike anything
else in the world, is this first view of the great gorge which is
called the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River. In that first moment
one is bewildered--and still disappointed. One had anticipated a more
instantaneous grandeur. But what is a first look here? Nothing, we
learned afterwards. It is nothing more than a blinding of the eyes,
a numbing of the senses. Before one lies an unutterable immensity of
things that is appalling. You think you see everything, and yet you
see nothing. You simply realize that you are looking on something
that is beyond you, out of your grasp, out of your reach, beyond your
comprehension. There is a certain dizziness in the air that you look
through. The earth has suddenly opened up before you and instead of
seeing mountains lifted in the air you see them in the earth beneath
you. Everything is at first without form and void. It is a dream, a
fantasy of the mind. But as you linger and look longer, gradually
things begin to assume forms and shapes and they begin to be real.
Objects begin to express themselves in colors also, in great masses of
colors, all colors and all variations of all colors. It is a creation
that is going on before you. The void begins to be filled with all
manner of formations. It is some such hour as when God said, “Let there
be light, and there was light.” In those first moments we are present
at another creation, and it is a creation, that is enacted for every
one who comes to partake of the glories of this canyon. To attempt to
describe it further would be like trying to weave a garland of roses
around a star.
The learned of the world, the poets, the painters and the writers have
lingered on this same rim, not for a day, but for weeks, charmed,
fascinated, bewildered, enthralled, but without being able to reproduce
either in colors or in words what they saw. Each one has picked up a
bit of color, where there are oceans of color. The scientist knows
that through countless ages the waters of the Colorado River have cut
this gorge into the earth, through the solid rock and the drifting
sand alike. It is a mile deep, thirteen miles from rim to rim and over
two hundred miles long. At the bottom of the gorge flows the creator
of this wonderful masterpiece of nature, the Colorado River. It is a
dashing, roaring river, maddened in its fury to get to the level of the
ocean, through unnumbered obstructions, but of all the fury with which
it lashes its sides, there is not a murmur that reaches you standing
at the rim of the canyon--the river is a mile below you and six miles
away. The deathlike stillness of dead ages hangs over the canyon.
Before Christ was, before Adam was, this work was completed. Still
a mighty river, in those primeval days the Colorado must have been
infinitely mightier to have removed the mountains that stood in its
course. To wear away the solid stone, disintegrate it and, in solution,
to carry it with its own waters to the ocean, that was the work that
the Colorado River had to perform to make this bed for itself. In
the Mojave desert the thought came to us, how precious is water, the
life of the world; here the thought comes to us, how mighty are the
waters when they are assembled together, the might of the world. There
glistening in the rainbow above the barren mountain peaks; here roaring
in their fury, dark and mirky and foreboding at the bottom of the
gorge.
As at the Yellowstone Canyon, so here every step brings a new view of
the canyon. It is not the same from any two points of observation. Of
its mere immensity one can form no adequate idea. The opposite side
looks hardly a mile off, but it is thirteen miles, in fact. All of
Pike’s Peak might be tumbled into it and hardly make a dam to hold the
waters back. In the drowsiness of the afternoon’s sun I thought one of
the mountains that stand in the bottom of the canyon looked like a huge
pulpit. I thought I saw terrace rise above terrace, up the slopes, and
fifty miles up and down the river. I thought how all the nations of the
earth might be gathered there and seated, and how an archangel might
speak to them and be heard by all. Not only terraces, but temples,
pagodas, castles, battleships, everything that one has ever seen that
is great or grand seems to be reproduced in this canyon, in such varied
ways has the water chiseled itself upon the rocks. Every conceivable
form of things, every imaginable color, has been worked out in this
great gorge. The sun goes down upon it, throwing the shadows of ragged
peaks across yawning chasms, multiplying the awfulness of things seen.
The full sun can not light the depths of it. In the darkness of the
night one walks on the rim of this canyon as on the shores of some
unexplored world, a world still in the process of creation.
Day after day, little parties of sightseers go down into the canyon,
down Bright Angel trail, on the backs of donkeys. It is thirteen miles
by the trail and then the river is still far below them, so far that
they can hardly hear the noise it makes between its rocky banks.
Many had said that when one has seen the Grand Canyon he has forgotten
all about the Canyon of the Yellowstone. But I did not find it so.
Nothing can ever make me forget the Canyon of the Yellowstone. The
two canyons are so different and so distinct that comparisons are
not possible, but contrasts are. In the Grand Canyon the colors are
heavier; in the Yellowstone Canyon the colors have the brightness
of the butterfly. The one is compact, the other immense. The one
is definite, conceivable and comprehensible; the other indefinite,
inconceivable and incomprehensible. The one produces the sensations of
nearness and dearness; the other of aloofness and vagueness. The one is
like a beautiful woman arrayed in many colors; the other like an angel
clothed in austerity.
When one has seen these two canyons, the west has nothing more to offer
him in the way of scenery. They sum up all the wonders that nature has
wrought in these cyclopean regions of the continent. One wants to see
them again, to see them many times again. In the last year of his life
he might desire to take a last look at them. And, if in the providence
of the theologians, we are all translated into angels, for one I shall
often be tempted to desert the glories celestial for these glories
terrestial, to hover over the scene where the Yellowstone River tumbles
over its precipices into the gorgeous depths below and where the
Colorado River roars at the bottom of the canyon which is the creation
of its own might and fury.