Winter and Cloud Effects
In winter some of the characteristics of the Grand Canyon are emphasized. The black gneiss below, the variegated quartzite, and the green or alcove sandstone form the foundation for the mighty red wall. The banded sandstone entablature is crowned by the tower limestone. In winter this is covered with snow. Seen from below, these changing elements seem to graduate into the heavens, and no plane of demarcation between wall and blue firmament can be seen. The heavens constitute a portion of the façade and mount into a vast dome from wall to wall, spanning the Grand Canyon with empyrean blue. So the earth and the heavens are blended in one vast structure.
Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody. The Lower Gorge, Foot of Bright Angel Trail.
When the clouds play in the canyon, as they often do in the rainy season, another set of effects is produced. Clouds creep out of canyons and wind into other canyons. The heavens seem to be alive, not moving as move the heavens over a plain, in one direction with the wind, but following the multiplied courses of these gorges. In this manner the little clouds seem to be individualized, to have wills and souls of their own and to be going on diverse errands—a vast assemblage of self-willed clouds faring here and there, intent upon purposes hidden in their own breasts. In imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and when they are in the canyon the skies come down into the gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift them up to immeasurable heights, for the sky must still be far away. Thus they lend infinity to the walls.
You can not see the Grand Canyon in one view as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths. It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of paradise.
Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody. On Grand View Point.
THE GREATEST THING IN THE WORLD
BY CHARLES F. LUMMIS
“The greatest thing in the world.” That is a large phrase and an over-worked one, and hardened travelers do not take it lightly upon the tongue. Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those but lately, and for the first time, wandered beyond their native state or county, and as every province has its own local brag of biggest things, the too credulous tourist will find a superlative everywhere. And superlatives are unsafe without wide horizons of comparison.
Yet in every sort there is, of course, somewhere “the biggest thing in the world” of its kind. It is a good word, when spoken in season and not abused in careless ignorance.
I believe there is and can be no dispute that the term applies literally to several things in the immediate region of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. As I have more than once written (and it never yet has been controverted), probably no other equal area on earth contains so many supreme marvels of so many kinds—so many astounding sights, so many masterpieces of Nature’s handiwork, so vast and conclusive an encyclopedia of the world-building processes, so impressive monuments of prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation—as what I have called the Southwestern Wonderland. This includes a large part of New Mexico and Arizona, the area which geographically and ethnographically we may count as the Grand Canyon region. Let me mention a few wonders:
The largest and by far the most beautiful of all petrified forests, with several hundred square miles whose surface is carpeted with agate chips and dotted with agate trunks two to four feet in diameter; and just across one valley a buried “forest” whose huge silicified—not agatized—logs show their ends under fifty feet of sandstone.
The largest natural bridge in the world—200 feet high, over 500 feet span, and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on its top and miles of stalactite caves under its abutments.
The largest variety and display of geologically recent volcanic action in North America; with 60-mile lava flows, 1,500-foot blankets of creamy tufa cut by scores of canyons; hundreds of craters and thousands of square miles of lava beds, basalt, and cinders, and so much “volcanic glass” (obsidian) that it was the chief tool of the prehistoric population.
The largest and the most impressive villages of cave-dwellings in the world, most of them already abandoned “when the world-seeking Genoese” sailed.
The peerless and many-storied cliff-dwellings—castles and forts and homes in the face of wild precipices or upon their tops—an aboriginal architecture as remarkable as any in any land.
The twenty-six strange communal town republics of the descendants of the “cliff-dwellers,” the modern Pueblos; some in fertile valleys, some (like Acoma and Moki) perched on barren and dizzy cliff tops. The strange dances, rites, dress, and customs of this ancient people who had solved the problem of irrigation, 6-story house building, and clean self-government, and even women’s rights—long before Columbus was born.
The noblest Caucasian ruins in America, north of Mexico—the great stone and adobe churches reared by Franciscan missionaries, near three centuries ago, a thousand miles from the ocean, in the heart of the Southwest.
Some of the most notable tribes of savage nomads—like the Navajos, whose blankets and silver work are pre-eminent, and the Apaches, who, man for man, have been probably the most successful warriors in history.
All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland without a parallel. There are ruins as striking as the storied ones along the Rhine, and far more remarkable. There are peoples as picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural wonders which have no peers whatever.