Surely Nowhere Else Are There Illustrations So Striking Of
The Natural Beauty Of Desolation And Death, So Many Of Nature's Own
Mountain Buildings Wasting In Glory Of High Desert Air - Going To Dust.
See how steadfast in beauty they all are in their going.
Look again
and again how the rough, dusty boulders and sand of disintegration
from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty for ashes - as in the flowers
of a prairie after fires - but here the very dust and ashes are
beautiful.
Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once
unbroken plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge
beds of rocks. Other valleys of erosion are as great - in all their
dimensions some are greater - but none of these produces an effect on
the imagination at once so quick and profound, coming without study,
given at a glance. Therefore by far the greatest and most influential
feature of this view from Bright Angel or any other of the canyon
views is the opposite wall. Of the one beneath our feet we see only
fragmentary sections in cirques and amphitheaters and on the sides of
the out-jutting promontories between them, while the other, though far
distant, is beheld in all its glory of color and noble proportions - the one supreme beauty and wonder to which the eye is ever turning.
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