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.
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