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.

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