Across America by Motor-cycle

by C. K. Shepherd

The thought was never finished.

It seemed as if the whole earth had suddenly stopped dead. There, in front, the great tree trunks stood silhouetted against space itself. It was as though something dreadful had happened. Beyond was tremendous, awful nothingness that made the observer catch his breath and sent a shiver throughout his frame. But see, there, on the distant horizon, like a dimly-coloured shadow, lies the opposite side of the gigantic rift, ten, twenty—aye, in places thirty miles away. It is a sight to enjoy in silence, with reverence and with fear. Once seen, it is never to be forgotten, that first glimpse of the greatest of all natural wonders—the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.

The trail made a sudden swerve to the left and followed close to its brink. There were some wooden railings; beyond, a varying strip of broken, rocky moorland; and then, space. Leaving Lizzie, I clambered down a narrow pathway carved in the rocks that led to a jutting prominence known as "Grand View Point." Seated on a huge lump of limestone that reared like a lofty pinnacle thousands of feet above the chasm below, I surveyed in mute bewilderment the overpowering, awe-inspiring sight.

The Grand Canyon has never been described. It is too immense, too sublime, too unearthly for mere words to convey one iota of its might and majesty. One struggles with the futility of mere expression by words where such a spectacle is concerned and finds that all the known phrases and well-used artifices of speech are useless to convey to another the sense of infinite grandeur that only sight can appreciate—and that so feebly!

The Canyon is a titanic rift in the earth, over 200 miles in length. The Colorado River, hardly ever seen from its brinks, lies 6,000 feet below the surface of the plain through which it has cut. Æons of time have been taken in the making of it, and it is yet but young, its progress still continuing. That sinister river, to reach which takes a seven-mile walk down the trail that leads to its waters, has cut down through strata of rock that took untold millions of years to be deposited, has cut lower and lower until it has come to the very beginning, the foundation of the earth, and then it has carved its way even through the granite, the very crust of the earth, to a depth of almost 1,000 feet. Eternal erosion by water, winds, and frost has helped it to play its part, and now nigh on 2,000 cubic miles of limestone, sandstone, and granite have disappeared entirely—all carried as sediment into the Pacific Ocean by the river that for ever swirls and rages in its bosom.

The actual settlement that goes by the name of the Grand Canyon is twenty miles further on. The trail follows closely the rim of the Canyon, cutting through the fringe of the "Coconino National Forest," with its stately pine trees that crowd up to the very edge of the plateau.

When the end of the trail is reached, it is as though the traveller had arrived at the edge of the world. On the right is a luxurious, low-built hotel all but toppling over the edge; on the left is a railway station; and that is all. The road almost doubles back on itself, swerving due south towards the Continental Trail eighty miles away. I do not mean to imply that at the end of this world there will be either a luxurious hotel or a railway station at the service of the weary traveller, but the appearance of finality of all things is complete when one is faced with that terrible chasm ahead.

For three days and three nights I sojourned at the Canyon, content to gaze upon its ever-changing colours, and to marvel at the wealth of beauty and variation of spectacle that lay in its mighty bosom, always changing, always fresh, always more wonderful than before. One day after breakfast I began strolling down the narrow "Bright Angel Trail" that leads from the summit to the river. Between two and three feet wide in most places, it is wonderfully built and kept in excellent repair for the mule-back parties of tourists that daily descend its seven tortuous miles in the morning and ascend them again in the evening. In places it is like a spiral pathway down an almost perpendicular wall. One looks over and sees it doubling and folding and twisting on itself like a thin white line until it is lost behind some prominence thousands of feet below.

I did not mean to walk down. Walking is not my forte; I only set out to take a few photographs. I have the best of reasons for believing that people never walk down the Canyon. Instead they bulge upon diminutive mules in strings of twenty or thirty or more and make the descent slowly, nervously, solemnly, and more or less in comfort. True, there are places where the trail is so precipitous that they have to dismount for safety's sake, but to walk the whole way would be absurd.