Roughing it De Luxe | Page 4

in the Spanish style, with wide
patios and pergolas--where a hundred persons might perg at one
time--and gay-striped awnings. It is flanked by flower-beds and
refreshingly green strips of lawn, with spouting fountains scattered
about.
You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright dining room and get as good a
meal as you can get anywhere on earth--and served in as good style, too.
To the man fresh from the East, such an establishment reminds him
vividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch places to which he has been
accustomed back home--places where the doughnuts are dornicks and
the pickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed
to be there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a couple
of hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. It reminds him of
them because it is so different. Between Kansas City and the Coast

there are a dozen or more of these hotels scattered along the line.
And so, with real food to stay you and one of Tuskegee's bright,
straw-colored graduates to minister to your wants in the sleeper, you
come on the morning of the third day to the Grand Cañon in northern
Arizona; you take one look--and instantly you lose all your former
standards of comparison. You stand there gazing down the raw, red
gullet of that great gosh-awful gorge, and you feel your self-importance
shriveling up to nothing inside of you. You haven't an adjective left to
your back. It makes you realize what the sensations would be of one
little microbe lost inside of Barnum's fat lady.
I think my preconceived conception of the Cañon was the same
conception most people have before they come to see it for
themselves--a straight up-and-down slit in the earth, fabulously steep
and fabulously deep; nevertheless merely a slit. It is no such thing.
Imagine, if you can, a monster of a hollow approximately some
hundreds of miles long and a mile deep, and anywhere from ten to
sixteen miles wide, with a mountain range--the most wonderful
mountain range in the world--planted in it; so that, viewing the
spectacle from above, you get the illusion of being in a stationary
airship, anchored up among the clouds; imagine these mountain
peaks--hundreds upon hundreds of them--rising one behind the other,
stretching away in endless, serried rank until the eye swims and the
mind staggers at the task of trying to count them; imagine them
splashed and splattered over with all the earthly colors you ever saw
and a lot of unearthly colors you never saw before; imagine them
carved and fretted and scrolled into all shapes--tabernacles, pyramids,
battleships, obelisks, Moorish palaces--the Moorish suggestion is
especially pronounced both in colorings and in shapes--monuments,
minarets, temples, turrets, castles, spires, domes, tents, tepees,
wigwams, shafts.
Imagine other ravines opening from the main one, all nuzzling their
mouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundreds
of these lesser cañons, and any one of them would be a marvel were
they not dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter.

Imagine walls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at
their base holes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the
Olden World and never know they were there--or miss them either.
Imagine a trail that winds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars
like a bird, and finally bores like a worm and is gone.
Imagine a great cloud-shadow cruising along from point to point,
growing smaller and smaller still, until it seems no more than a shifting
purple bruise upon the cheek of a mountain, and then, as you watch it,
losing itself in a tiny rift which at that distance looks like a wrinkle in
the seamed face of an old squaw, but which is probably a huge gash
gored into the solid rock for a thousand feet of depth and more than a
thousand feet of width.
Imagine, way down there at the bottom, a stream visible only at certain
favored points because of the mighty intervening ribs and chines of
rock--a stream that appears to you as a torpidly crawling yellow worm,
its wrinkling back spangled with tarnished white specks, but which is
really a wide, deep, brawling, rushing river--the Colorado--full of
torrents and rapids; and those white specks you see are the tops of
enormous rocks in its bed.
Imagine--if it be winter--snowdrifts above, with desert flowers
blooming alongside the drifts, and down below great stretches of green
verdure; imagine two or three separate snowstorms visibly raging at
different points, with clear, bright stretches of distance intervening
between them, and nearer maybe a splendid rainbow arching downward
into the great void; for these meteorological three-ring circuses are not
uncommon