Roughing it De Luxe | Page 5

at certain seasons.
Imagine all this spread out beneath the unflawed turquoise of the
Arizona sky and washed in the liquid gold of the Arizona
sunshine--and if you imagine hard enough and keep it up long enough
you may begin, in the course of eight or ten years, to have a faint, a
very faint and shadowy conception of this spot where the shamed
scheme of creation is turned upside down and the very womb of the
world is laid bare before our impious eyes. Then go to Arizona and see
it all for yourself, and you will realize what an entirely inadequate and

deficient thing the human imagination is.
It is customary for the newly arrived visitor to take a ride along the
edge of the cañon--the rim-drive, it is called--with stops at Hopi Point
and Mohave Point and Pima Point, and other points where the views
are supposed to be particularly good. To do this you get into a smart
coach drawn by horses and driven by a competent young man in a
khaki uniform. Leaving behind you a clutter of hotel buildings and
station buildings, bungalows and tents, you go winding away through a
Government forest reserve containing much fine standing timber and
plenty more that is not so fine, it being mainly stunted piñon and gnarly
desert growths.
Presently the road, which is a fine, wide, macadamized road, skirts out
of the trees and threads along the cañon until it comes to a rocky flange
that juts far over. You climb out there and, instinctively treading lightly
on your tiptoes and breathing in syncopated breaths, you steal across
the ledge, going slowly and carefully until you pause finally upon the
very eyelashes of eternity and look down into that great inverted
muffin-mold of a cañon.
You are at the absolute jumping-off place. There is nothing between
you and the undertaker except six-thousand feet, more or less, of
dazzling Arizona climate. Below you, beyond you, stretching both
ways from you, lie those buried mountains, the eternal herds of the
Lord's cattlefold; there are scars upon their sides, like the marks of a
mighty branding iron, and in the distance, viewed through the
vapor-waves of melting snow, their sides seem to heave up and down
like the flanks of panting cattle. Half a mile under you, straight as a
man can spit, are gardens of willows and grasses and flowers, looking
like tiny green patches, and the tents of a camp looking like scattered
playing cards; and there is a plateau down there that appears to be as
flat as your hand and is seemingly no larger, but actually is of a size
sufficient for the evolutions of a brigade of cavalry.
[Illustration: THERE WAS NOT A TURKEY TROTTER IN THE
BUNCH]

When you have had your fill of this the guide takes you and leads
you--you still stepping lightly to avoid starting anything--to a spot from
which he points out to you, riven into the face of a vast perpendicular
chasm above a cave like a monstrous door, a tremendous and perfect
figure seven--the house number of the Almighty Himself. By this I
mean no irreverence. If ever Jehovah chose an earthly abiding-place,
surely this place of awful, unutterable majesty would be it. You move a
few yards farther along and instantly the seven is gone--the shift of
shadow upon the rock wall has wiped it out and obliterated it--but you
do not mourn the loss, because there are still upward of a million things
for you to look at.
And then, if you have timed wisely the hour of your coming, the sun
pretty soon goes down; and as it sinks lower and lower out of titanic
crannies come the thickening shades, making new plays and tricks of
painted colors upon the walls--purples and reds and golds and blues,
ambers and umbers and opals and ochres, yellows and tans and tawnys
and browns--and the cañon fills to its very brim with the silence of
oncoming night.
You stand there, stricken dumb, your whole being dwarfed yet
transfigured; and in the glory of that moment you can even forget the
gabble of the lady tourist alongside of you who, after searching her soul
for the right words, comes right out and gives the Grand Cañon her
cordial indorsement. She pronounces it to be just perfectly lovely! But I
said at the outset I was not going to undertake to describe the Grand
Cañon--and I'm not. These few remarks were practically jolted out of
me and should not be made to count in the total score.
Having seen the cañon--or a little bit of it--from the top, the next thing
to do is to go down into it and view it from the sides and the bottom.
Most of the