—SERVICE
CHAPTER ONE
THE GRAND CANYON
The Grand Canyon of the Colorado is the world’s most famous gorge, in which Mr. Lummis says: “All the world’s famous gorges could be lost forever.”
Charles Dudley Warner said of this spot: “Human experience has no prototype of this region, and the imagination has never conceived of its forms and colours.... The scene is one to strike dumb with awe, or to unstring the nerves.... All that we could comprehend was a vast confusion of amphitheatres and strange architectural forms resplendent with colour.... Streaks of solid hues 1,000 feet in width, yellows mingled with white and gray, orange, dull red, brown, blue, carmine, and green all blending in the sunlight into one transcendent effusion of splendour.”
Here is truly one of the most marvellous nature wonders of the world, and comparatively few of us have seen it. It is stupendous! It is incomprehensible!
The canyon lies chiefly in Arizona, though Utah, Nevada, and California touch each a corner. It is nearly 300 miles long and in places 6,600 feet deep; the width at the top is from 8 to 20 miles. The river lying below is in places 300 feet wide, and is 2,400 feet above sea level; yet looking down from the rim it seems the smallest stream, the merest thread.
The Santa Fé trains run twice a day to the canyon.[1] There is a fine, big hotel, the El Tovar, with every modern comfort, built on a site 7,000 feet above sea level and quite near the rim, commanding such a view as can hardly be equalled in the world.
Mr. C. A. Higgins in his “The Titan of Chasms,” says: “Stolid indeed is he who can front the awful scene and view its unearthly splendour of colour and form without quaking knee or tremulous breath. An inferno swathed in soft, celestial fires; a whole chaotic under-world, just emptied of primeval floods and waiting for a new creative word; eluding all sense of perspective or dimension, outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of definite apprehension; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet spectral as a dream.... A labyrinth of huge architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices, festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper cliffs and painted with every colour known to the palette in pure, transparent tones of marvellous delicacy.