The Grand Canyon
From here on for many miles the whole character of the canyon changes. First a dike appears; this is a wall of black basalt crossing the river; it is of lava thrust up from below through a huge crevice broken in the rock by earthquake agency. On the east the Little Colorado comes; here it is a river of salt water, and it derives its salt a few miles up the stream. The main Colorado flows along the eastern and southern wall. Climbing this for a few hundred feet you may look off toward the northwest and gaze at the cliffs of the Kaibab Plateau.
This is the point where we built a trail down a side canyon where Mr. Walcott was to make his winter residence and study of the region; it is very complicated and exhibits a vast series of unconformable rocks of high antiquity. These lower rocks are of many colors; in large part they are shales. The region, which appears to be composed of bright-colored hills washed naked by the rain, is, in fact, beset with a multitude of winding canyons with their own precipitous walls. It is a region of many canyons in the depths of the Grand Canyon itself.
In this beautiful region Mr. Walcott, reading the book of geology, lived in a summerland during all of a long winter while the cliffs above were covered with snow which prevented his egress to the world. His companions, three young Mormons, longing for a higher degree of civilization, gazed wistfully at the snow-clad barriers by which they were inclosed. One was a draughtsman, another a herder of his stock, and the third his cook. They afterward told me that it was a long winter of homesickness, and that months dragged away as years, but Mr. Walcott himself had the great book of geology to read, and to him it was a winter of delight.
A half dozen miles below the basaltic wall the river enters a channel carved in 800 or 1,000 feet of dark gneiss of very hard rock. Here the channel is narrow and very swift and beset with rapids and falls. On the south and southwest the wall rises abruptly from the water to the summit of the plateau for about 6,000 feet, but across the river on the north and west mountains of gneiss and quartzites appear, sometimes rising to the height of a thousand feet. These are mountains in the bottom of a canyon. The buttes and plateaus of the inter-canyon region are composed of shales, sandstones, and limestones, which give rise to vast architectural shelving and to pinnacles and towers of gigantic proportions, the whole embossed with a marvelously minute system of fretwork carved by the artistic clouds. Looking beyond these mountains, buttes, and plateaus vistas of the walls of the great plateau are seen. From these walls project salients, and deep re-entrant angles appear.
The whole scene is forever reminding you of mighty architectural pinnacles and towers and balustrades and arches and columns with lattice work and delicate carving. All of these architectural features are sublime by titanic painting in varied hues—pink, red, brown, lavender, gray, blue, and black. In some lights the saffron prevails, in other lights vermilion, and yet in other lights the grays and blacks predominate. At times, and perhaps in rare seasons, clouds and cloudlets form in the canyon below and wander among the side canyons and float higher and higher until they are dissolved in the upper air, or perhaps they accumulate to hide great portions of the landscape. Then through rifts in the clouds vistas of Wonderland are seen. Such is that portion of the canyon around the great south bend of the Colorado River past the point of the Kaibab Plateau.