Think of a chasm a mile and a half deep, from thirteen to eighteen miles wide, and as long as from Boston to New York—two hundred miles! Think of it again as not merely a deep, dark chasm, but as filled with the most wonderful architectural effects in the sandstone formations which simulate Chinese pagodas, temples, altars, cathedrals, domes, and towers so perfectly that one is incredulous of the fact that their shaping is nature's work alone. Add to this the color scheme, now an intense royal purple, again flashes of rose and green and ivory and a rare blue; or again a "nocturne" in silvery gray, with hints of lingering rose and amber shimmering in the air. Until within a few years the Grand Cañon was so inaccessible as to quite account for the general ignorance of this most wonderful scenic phenomenon in our country, and, indeed, with no exaggeration be it said, the most wonderful in the entire world. Twenty Yosemites might be thrown into it and make no impression; and as for Niagara, it would be a mere tiny waterfall in comparison.
In the trail leading downward into the cañon the first level is just five times the height of St. Peter's in Rome, or the Pyramids of Cheops.
A CLIFF ON BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, GRAND CAÑON
From the brink one looks down a mile and a half into towers and pinnacles; one looks across eighteen miles in the widest place; and one looks up and down its tortuous length, as its complicated system of cañons revealed themselves as far as the eye could see either way. One gazes, not into a deep, dark cleft, a Titanic royal gorge, but on and into a sea of color and a wealth of architectural wonders,—cathedrals, towers, mosques, pinnacles, minarets, temples, and balconies exceeding in variety of design, in extraordinary beauty of grouping and splendor of color, anything of which one could dream, even in his most enchanted moments. The red sandstone, the brilliant white of the limestone luminous under the setting sun, the green of pine trees or of copper rocks, the gray and ochre tints of gravel and fallen rocks and débris, the soft, deep purple mist enveloping all as an atmosphere in which all these architectural marvels seemed to swim—the strange, unearthly splendor of it all—holds one under a fascination that can neither be analyzed nor described. This, then, is "El Grande Cañon de la Colorado." One stands speechless, breathless, as if transported to some other planet. Suddenly all life—everything that floated in memory—seemed confused, unreal. Was the past (whose running series of incident and event and circumstance already seemed vague) a dream, and was this the reality? Or had there never been any reality in life before? Was this a dream, wrought under some untold spell of enchantment? Would one hear the water nixies chanting their refrain if he listened? Or was this scene of Titanic grandeur the abode of Wagner's gods and heroes? One watched for the sacred fires to flame on Brunhilde's rock and for Siegfried to appear. One saw the ship which had borne Tristan on his ill-starred voyage, and the garden where the lovers confessed their intense and instant love, and the fatal potion scene rises before him; and again he is lost in rapt ecstasy as the air seems filled with the passionate drama of Lilli Lehmann and Alvarez. For let Ternina and other younger women come and go in the Wagner music-drama, and yet where will that absolute perfection of dramatic action, that passionate exaltation of emotion, ever again attend and invest any singer as they invest and are identified with Lilli Lehmann?
"The Fairest enchants me,
The Mighty commands me."
In this most sublime of all earthly spectacles there are aërial landscape effects as delicate and evanescent as a cloud-wreath, or as a fog that advances, wraith-like, to melt away into dissolving views. "The region is full of wonders and beauties and sublimities that Shelley's imaginings do not match in the 'Prometheous Unbound,'" wrote Charles Dudley Warner.
If the world realized the marvellous effects of this very Carnival of the Gods, the infinite spaces of the Grand Cañon itself could not contain all who would eagerly throng to behold it. The statistical record of the increase of visitors is rather interesting. In 1900 there were eight hundred and thirteen; the succeeding year, six thousand eight hundred and eighty-three; while in 1903 the number increased to nearly one hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Since that date the number of visitors has multiplied itself after the fashion of compound interest. The establishment of all the conveniences and comforts, not to say luxuries, of modern travel may be one of the most potent factors in this increase of visitors. Until within five years the Grand Cañon could only be reached by a stage ride of seventy miles through the Coconino Forest,—whose dim gray twilight reminds one of the forests of Fontainebleau,—and which drive, however romantically beautiful, was attended with too great terrestrial discomfort to commend it to general public service. Until 1906 the hotel accommodations, also, while offering a modest comfort, were essentially primitive; while now the superb new Harvey hostelry, "El Tovar," built at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars (and the Harvey name is a synonym in the West for everything admirable in dining cars, refreshment stands, and hotels), insures to every traveller any degree of luxurious comfort he requires. Even the man who, after visiting all the enchanted points in the Land of Enchantment, in its prehistoric period of twenty years ago before Pullman cars climbed the mountain peaks and the Waldorf-Astoria type of hotels sprang up, the man who, after a trip through these wonders of the world, returned to New York and declared that he would rather see an electric bell and a bath than all the grandeur between Pike's Peak and the Pacific, would now be fully reconciled to Western sojourns. He would find his electric bell and his bath to be as much a matter of course as in Fifth Avenue, besides also finding that there were spectacles,—as that of the Garden of the Gods, Cheyenne Cañon, the Petrified Forests, the Grand Cañon, and the Los Angeles electric trolley system (which quite deserves to rank with the modern "Seven Wonders" of the world), and which Fifth Avenue by no means provided for her votaries. In fact, "El Tovar" is so inclusive of comfort as to be fairly a feature of the cañon, commanding, on one side, a magnificence of prospect without parallel in the world in the mighty chasm on whose brink it stands, on the other side the fragrant Coconino pine forest,—the largest belt of pine timber in the United States, and which has been made a government forest reservation.