At Midday, With The Sun Glaring Through Into Its Depths, The
Reds And Chocolates Of The Sandstones (Which Are The Predominating Colors)
Are So Strong, And The Relieving Shadows So Few, That It Seems
Uninteresting.
But let one watch it as I did last night, between the 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 "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.
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