The Grand Canyon of Arizona | Page 7

"majesty" suggests a kingly presence, a large man of
dignified mien, or a sequoia standing supreme over all other trees in the
forest. But a thousand men of majesty could be placed unseen in one
tiny rift in this gorge, and all the sequoias of the world could be planted
in one stretch of this Canyon, and never be noticed by the most careful
watcher on the rim.
Another, reaching the Canyon at night, declared that she and her
companions seemed to be "standing in midair, while below, the dark
depths were lost in blackness and mystery." Again mere words! words!
For whoever stood in mid-air?
Still another calls it "the most ineffable thing that exists within the
range of man," and later explains when he stands on the brink of it;
"And where the Grand Canyon begins, words stop." Yet he goes on and
uses about four more pages of words, and pictures after words have
stopped, to tell what he felt and saw. And the remarkable thing is that
his experience is that of all the wisest men who have ever seen it. They
know they cannot describe it, but they proceed to exhaust their
vocabularies in talking about it, and in trying to make clear to others
what they saw and felt. And in this very fact what a wonderful tribute
lies to the power of the Canyon; that a wise and prudent man is led to
strive to do what he vows he will not do, and knows he cannot do.
One well-known poet exclaims: "It was like sudden death." yet she is
still alive. Again, after breakfast, she wrote: "My courage rose to meet
the greatness of the world." Then she "crawled half prostrate" to the
barest and highest rocks she could find on the rim, and confessed: "It
made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and

beaten under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes
here; in these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits
must range and soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring."
Yet here I have heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse
ravings of angry men--none of them impressed as was the soul of the
poet.
One money-making business man declared that he went to the rim at
night-time, and when he and his friends reached the spot they put forth
their hands and found--"an absolute end. We clutched vainly at black
space. To fathom this space we thrust over a big stone. No sound came
back. The pit was bottomless--the grave of the world. The mystery
fascinated, the void beckoned. We scarcely knew why we did not obey
the summons--why we did not abandon the present, and, by following
the big stone, escape to the future." And yet he had no urgent creditors
bothering him. His financial position was secure and unquestioned. His
family relations were all that could be desired. Wonderful, indeed, that
a mere feature of natural scenery could have led him to wonder why he
didn't leave all the luxuries and certainties of life, and leap into the
unknown future! Yet that is just the way the Canyon affected a sober
business man of steady judgment.
A well-known writer declares: "It is a paradox of chaos and repose, of
gloom and radiance, of immeasurable desolation and enthralling beauty.
It is a despair and a joy; a woe and an ecstasy; a requiem and a
hallelujah; a world-ruin and a world-glory--everything in antithesis of
such titanic sort." I agree with him, and regard his expressions as
indicative of my own sensations.
Yet, when a reverend gentleman calls it a "delirium of nature," I cannot
agree with him. The delirium might be in his own mind, but there is no
delirium here. Neither does it seem to me that a certain university
president expresses things with any more wisdom or effectiveness,
when he says that it "impressed him with its infinite laziness." Lazy?
When once, in the far-distant past, after rising from the primeval sea, it
sank back again and deposited twelve thousand feet of strata, then lifted
them out into the sunshine, carved eleven thousand feet of them away,

and sent them dashing down the river to fill up the Gulf of California
and make the Mohave and Colorado Deserts? Lazy? When, after that
was done, it sank again, and allowed a thousand feet of Cambrian to be
deposited; then two thousand feet of Carboniferous; then Permian,
Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, until the three thousand feet were
increased to two miles of deposits. Then it began to lift itself up again.
Lazy? When lifting up two miles' thickness of strata for the clouds and
their children to carve away? And it lifted and lifted, until it