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. 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.
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