Other
Departments Are A Blacksmith, Carpenter And Paint Shop; Harness, Storage,
And Repair Rooms, Offices For The Stable Manager And His Assistants; And A
Large Wagon-Room Where The Carriages, Wagons, And Other Conveyances Are
Housed.
Visitors to this part of the stables will note an interesting
feature in the painting of the vehicles, namely, that each is in the El
Tovar colors, the body being dark yellow, and the wheels lighter yellow,
striped with red.
Each coach bears, in addition to the coat of arms of
Pedro del Tovar, an individual name, selected from tribes of the Southwest
Indians. For instance, visitors will recall having driven to various points
on the rim in stages named "Navaho," "Supai," "Walpi," etc.
A large corral provides for the turning out of stock not in use.
Employees' Quarters. There is also a building devoted to the accommodation
of the employees of this department, comprised of kitchen and dining-rooms,
sleeping quarters, and a smoking, reading and recreation room.
The grounds around the employees' building, commonly called the mess house,
are laid off into walks and gardens. Owing to the quantity and quality of
the soil being superior to that around El Tovar (which is near the rim and
therefore on almost naked rock), the grass, and the domestic and wild
flowers, which are cared for by the men, thrive abundantly.
The Mallery Grotto. This is a small and rather insignificant cave just
under the rim, to the extreme left (west) of El Tovar amphitheatre, wherein
a number of interesting Indian pictographs are to be seen. The overhanging
rock makes a rude cave or grotto, and it has been named Mallery Grotto,
after Garrick Mallery, the great authority on the pictographs of the North
American Indians. His latest monograph takes up the whole of one of the
large volumes of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, and in its nearly
eight hundred pages there are one thousand two hundred and ninety
illustrations. To this illuminating book, therefore, the curious student is
referred for further information regarding the pictographs themselves.
Trail to Mallery Grotto. Leaving El Tovar, the visitor can easily walk to
and from Mallery Grotto in half an hour: Keeping on the rim, he passes the
old Bright Angel Hotel, and all the buildings, about as far past the log
house as, that is from El Tovar. There, in a slight depression, he will see
the foot-trail leading down from the rim to the Grotto. It is a place about
forty to fifty feet long, and with an overhanging wall of from five to
fifteen feet high, and ten to twenty feet broad. The shelf upon which one
walks is narrow, but I have slept there many a time in cold and rainy
weather.
The pictographs are mainly in a rich brownish-red, and are of deer,
mountain-sheep, men and women, serpentine lines suggesting the course of
rivers, rain-clouds, lightning, and many-legged reptiles, - or what seem to
represent these things.
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