No, it opens. Resisting centripetal, centrifugal force claims the train, and it breaks away at a tangent past the edge or round the corner of the great black wall which compelled its detour, and that of the river before it. Now what glories of rock-piling confront the wide-distended eye. How those sharp-edged cliffs, standing with upright heads that play at hand-ball with the clouds, alternate with one another, so that first the right, then the left, then the right one beyond strike on our view, each one half obscured by its fellow in front, each showing itself level-browed with its comrades as we come even with it, each a score of hundreds of dizzy feet in height, rising perpendicular from the water and the track, splintered atop into airy pinnacles, braced behind against the almost continental mass through which the chasm has been cleft.
This is the Royal Gorge!
But how faintly I tell it—how inexpressible are the wonders of plutonic force it commemorates, how magnificent the pose and self-sustained majesty of its walls, how stupendous the height as we look up, the depth if we were to gaze timidly down, how splendid the massive shadows at the base of the interlocking headlands,—the glint of sunlight on the upper rim and the high polish of the crowning points! One must catch it all as an impression on the retina of his mind’s eye,—must memorize it instantly and ponder it afterward. It is ineffable, but the thought of it remains through years and years a legacy of vivid recollection and delight, and you never cease to be proud that you have seen it.
There is more cañon after that—miles and miles of it—the Grand Cañon of the Arkansas. In and out of all the bends and elbows, gingerly round the promontories whose very feet the river laves, rapidly across the small, sheltered nooks, where soil has been drifted and a few adventurous trees have grown, noisily through the echoing cuttings, the train rushes westward, letting you down gradually from the tense excitement of the great chasm, to the cedar-strewn ledges that fade out into the the gravel bars and the park-like spaces of the open valley beyond Cotopaxi.
Thomas Paine tells us in his Age of Reason: “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately.” It is good philosophy also, that the higher the strain the longer the rebound; so no excuse is needed for asking you to enjoy as heartily as we did, the story an old fellow told us at the supper station, who dropped the hint that he had been one of the “boys” who had helped push the railway through this cañon. Moreover, he helped us to a new phase of human nature as exemplified in the mind of an “old timer.”
The influence of the cañon on the ordinary tourist, perhaps, will be comparatively transient, fading into a dream-like memory of amazing mental impressions. Not so with the man who has dwelt, untutored, for many years, amid these stupendous hills and abysmal gorges. His imagination, once aroused and enlarged, continues to expand; his fiction, once created, hardens into fact; his veracity, once elongated, stretches on and on forever. Of all natural curiosities he is the most curious,—more marvelous than even the Grand Cañon itself.
Strictly sane and truthful in the day-time, he speaks only of commonplace things; but when the night comes, and the huge mountains group themselves around his camp-fire like a circle of black Cyclopean tents, he shades his face from the blaze and bids his imagination stalk forth with Titanic strides. Then, if his hearers are in sympathy, with self-repressed and nonchalant gravity, he pours forth in copious detail his strange experiences with bears and bronchos, Indians and serpents, footpads and gamblers, mines and mules, tornadoes and forest-fires. He never for a moment weakens the effect of his story by giving way to gush and enthusiasm; he makes his facts eloquent, and then relates them in the careless monotone of one who is superior to emotion under any circumstances.
We could not find our old-timer in these most favorable circumstances, but ensconced behind
“Sublime tobacco! which from east to west,
Cheers the tar’s labors, or the Turkman’s rest,”