The Grand Cañon of the Arkansas, and its culminating chasm, the Royal Gorge, lie between Salida and Cañon City, and form a sufficient theme for a chapter by themselves. It was on our return from Silver Cliff that we went there.
Situated only half a dozen miles west of Cañon City, the traveler going either to Leadville or Gunnison, begins to watch for the cañon as soon as he has passed the city limits, the penitentiary and the mineral springs. If he looks ahead he sees the vertically tilted, whitish strata of sandstone and limestone, which the upthrust of the interior mountains has set on edge, broken at a narrow portal through which the graceful river finds the first freedom of the plains,—becomes of age, so to speak, and commences, however awkwardly, that manly progress that by and by will enable it to take its important place in the commerce of the world,—
“——The river,
Which through continents pushes its pathway forever,
To fling its fond heart in the sea.”
Running the gauntlet of these scraggy warders of the castle of the mountain gods within, the train boldly assaults the gates of the castle itself. From the smoothness of the outer world, where the eye can range in wide vision, taking in the profiles of countless noble chains and lowlier but serviceable ridges; where the sun shines broadly, and its light and heat are reflected in shimmering volumes from expanses of whitened soil, the eager traveler now finds himself locked between precipitous hillsides, strewn with jagged fragments, as though the Titans had tossed in here the chips from their workshop of the world. He strives for language large enough to picture the heights that with ceaselessly growing altitude hasten to meet him. He searches his fancy after images and similitudes that shall help him comprehend and recall the swiftly crowding forms of Nature’s massive architecture. He taxes his eyes and mind and memory to see and preserve, until he can have leisure to study this exhibition of the depth and breadth of the barrier that so long has loomed before him in silent majesty, yet for which the world has found no better name than the Rocky mountains. He has gone past it,—gone over it, it may be; now he is going through it. The track, as he rushes ahead, seems bodily to sink deeper and deeper into the earth, as though the apparent progress forward only resulted in impotent struggles to keep from sinking deeper, like an exhausted swimmer in swift waters. The roar of the yeasty, nebulous-green river at his side, mingles with the crashing echoes of the train, reverberating heavenward through rocks that rise perpendicularly to unmeasured heights. The ear is stunned, and the mind refuses to sanction what the senses report to it.
BROWN’S CAÑON.
Then a new surprise and almost terror comes. The train rolls round a long curve, close under a wall of black and banded granite, beside which the ponderous locomotive shrinks to a mere dot, as if swinging on some pivot in the heart of the mountain, or captured by a centripetal force that would never resign its grasp. Almost a whole circle is accomplished, and the grand amphitheatrical sweep of the wall shows no break in its smooth and zenith-cutting façade. Will the journey end here? Is it a mistake that this crevice goes through the range? Does not all this mad water gush from some powerful spring, or boil out of a subterranean channel impenetrable to us?