Powell's And Dutton's Descriptions Present Magnificent Views Not Only
Of The Canyon But Of All The Grand Region Round About It; And Holmes's
Drawings, Accompanying Dutton's Report, Are Wonderfully Good.
Surely
faithful and loving skill can go no farther in putting the
multitudinous decorated forms on paper.
But the COLORS, the living
rejoicing COLORS, chanting morning and evening in chorus to heaven!
Whose brush or pencil, however lovingly inspired, can give us these?
And if paint is of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work? Only this:
some may be incited by it to go and see for themselves.
No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same
extent have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored.
The famous Yellowstone Canyon below the falls comes to mind; but,
wonderful as it is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with
this it is only a bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines.
Each of the series of level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of
the canyon has, as we have seen, its own characteristic color. The
summit limestone beds are pale yellow; next below these are the
beautiful rose-colored cross-bedded sandstones; next there are a
thousand feet of brilliant red sandstones; and below these the red
wall limestones, over two thousand feet thick, rich massy red, the
greatest and most influential of the series, and forming the main
color-fountain. Between these are many neutral-tinted beds. The
prevailing colors are wonderfully deep and clear, changing and
blending with varying intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season
to season; throbbing, wavering, glowing, responding to every passing
cloud or storm, a world of color in itself, now burning in separate
rainbow bars streaked and blotched with shade, now glowing in one
smooth, all-pervading ethereal radiance like the alpenglow, uniting
the rocky world with the heavens.
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