The Grand Canyon of Arizona | Page 6

hours
of seven and ten, and again this morning from five until eight of the
clock. What revelations of forms, what richness of colors; what
transformations of apparently featureless walls into angles and arches
and recesses and facets and entablatures and friezes and facades. What
lighting up of towers and temples and buttes and minarets and
pinnacles and ridges and peaks and pillars of erosion! What exposures
of detached and isolated mountains of rock, of accompanying gorges
and ravines, deep, forbidding, black and unknown, the depths of which
the foot of man has never trod! Turner never depicted such dazzling
scenes, Rembrandt such violent and yet attractive contrasts. Here
everything is massive and dominating. The colors are vivid; the
shadows are purple to blackness; the heights are towering; the depths
are appalling; the sheer walls are as if poised in mid-air; the towers and
temples dwarf into insignificance even the monster works of man on
the Nile. Here are single mountains of erosion standing as simple
features of the vast sight spread out for miles before you, that are as
high as the highest mountains of the Eastern States. A score of Mt.
Washingtons find repose in the depths of this incomprehensible
waterway, in the two hundred and seventeen miles of its length. In
width it varies from ten to twenty miles, and at the point where I now
sit writing, where the Canyon makes a double bow-knot in a marvelous
bend, the north wall (which, in the sharp bend of the river, becomes the
south wall of the reverse of the curve) is completely broken down, so
that one has a clear and direct view across two widths of canyon and

river to a distance of from thirty-five to forty miles. Who can really
"take in" such a view? I have gazed upon the Canyon at this spot
almost yearly, and often daily for weeks at a time, for about twenty
years, yet such is the marvelousness of distance, that never until two
days ago did I discover that a giant detached mountain, fully eight
thousand feet high, and with a base ten miles square, which I had
photographed from another angle on the north side of the Canyon,
stood in the direct line of my sight and, as it were, immediately before
me. The discovery was made by a peculiar falling of light and shadow.
The heavens were filled with clouds which threw complete shadows on
the far north wall. The sun happened to shine through the clouds and
light up the whole contour of this Steamboat Mountain (so called
because of its shape), so that it stood forth clearly outlined against the
dark field behind. In surprise I called to my companion and showed her
my discovery. Yet, such is the deceptiveness of distance that, to the
unaided eye, and without being aware of the fact, even my observant
faculties had never before perceived that this gigantic mass was not a
portion of the great north wall, from which it is detached by a canyon
fully eight miles wide.
No one can know the Grand Canyon, in all its phases. It is one of those
sights that words cannot exaggerate. What does it matter how deep you
say--in hundreds or thousands of feet--the Canyon is, when you cannot
see to the bottom of it? Strict literalists may stick out for the exact
figures in feet and inches from rim to river--elsewhere given as the
scientists of the United States Geological Survey have recorded
them--but to me they are almost valueless. Its depth is beyond human
comprehension in figures, and so is its width. And the eye of the best
trained man in the world cannot grasp all its features of wall and butte
and canyon, of winding ridge and curving ravine, of fell precipice and
rocky gorge, in a week, a month, a year, or a lifetime. Hence words can
but suggest; nothing can describe the indescribable; nothing can picture
what no man ever has seen in its completeness.
What Men Have Said of the Canyon. Men have stood before it and
called it "an inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires;" but what is an
inferno? And who ever saw the fires of heaven? Words! words! words!

Charles Dudley Warner, versed in much and diverse world-scenery,
mountain-sculpture, canyon-carvings, and plain-sweep, confessed: "I
experienced for a moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion
of mind, a fear to be alone in such a presence. With all its
grotesqueness and majesty of form and radiance of color, creation
seemed in a whirl." When the reader thinks of grotesqueness, what
images come to his mind? A Chinese joss, perhaps; a funny human face
on the profile of a rock, but nothing so vast, so awful, so large as this.
The word