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.
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