Roughing it De Luxe | Page 5

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 ca?on--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 pi?on and gnarly desert growths.
Presently the road, which is a fine, wide, macadamized road, skirts out of the trees and threads along the ca?on 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 ca?on.
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 ca?on 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 Ca?on 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 Ca?on--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 ca?on--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 visitors follow the Bright Angel Trail which is handily near by and has an assuring name. There are only two ways to do the inside of the Grand Ca?on--afoot and on mule-back. El Tovar hotel provides the necessary regalia, if you have not come prepared--divided skirts for the women and leggings for the men, a mule apiece and