Major Powell, the explorer and practically the modern discoverer of the cañon, remains its most complete interpreter. His journal narrating that remarkable voyage through the Colorado River in a region "more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas," is fairly an epic in American literature. He had the vision of the painter and the heart of the poet. He felt that infinitely complex variety of the cañon, and he read its sublime inscriptions on a scroll not made with hands. He pictures one feature especially that has hardly been touched by other writers,—that of the perpetually changing aspects. "One moment as we looked out over the landscape," he writes, "the atmosphere seemed to be trembling and moving about, giving the impression of an unstable land: plains and hills and cliffs and distant mountains seemed vaguely to be floating about in a trembling, wave-rocked sea; and patches of landscape would seem to float away and be lost, and then reappear.... The craggy buttes seem dancing about.... The sun shone in splendor on the vermilion walls. Shaded into green and gray when the rocks were lichened over, the river filled the channel from wall to wall, and the cañon opened like a beautiful doorway to a region of glory. But at evening, when the sun was going down and the shadows were settling in the cañon, the scarlet gleams and roseate hues, blended with tints of green and gray, slowly changed to sombre brown above and black shadows crept over them from below.... Lying down, one looked up through the cañon and saw that only a little of the blue heavens appeared overhead,—a crescent of blue sky with but two or three constellations peering down upon us. Soon I saw a bright star that appeared to rest on the verge of the cliffs overhead, and, as it moved up from the rock, I almost wondered that it did not fall, and indeed it appeared as if swayed down by its own weight. The star appeared to be in the cañon, so high were the walls."
So the wonderful story of Major Powell's runs on of these atmospheric phenomena of the cañon, effects that
"... give to seas and sunset skies
Their unspent beauty of surprise."
It is from Bright Angel Trail that the Grand Cañon is the most accessible. Parties of men and women, mounted on sure-footed burros, go down this trail with their guides—apparently under the special protection of the bright angels of the celestial host, as no accident has ever, thus far, occurred. Prof. George Wharton James notes, in his invaluable work on the Grand Cañon,[5] that this trail was originally used by the Havasupai Indians and that the rude irrigating canals that conveyed water from an adjacent spring to a so-called Indian Garden in the near vicinity are still to be seen. The view from the head of Bright Angel Trail is one of vast extent and a peculiar sublimity. Buddha Temple is a colossal pile that rises in isolated grandeur, and near it is Buddha Cloister. An impressive tower of rock rising in the cañon bears the honored name of Agassiz. Isis Temple and the Temple of Brahma are within the range of the eye from this point. The perfectly transparent air, and that absence of aërial vibration that characterizes the atmosphere of Arizona, conspire to invest all distance with magic illusion. Looking across the thirteen miles of the cañon's abyss from Bright Angel Trail, the opposite rim hardly seems farther away than the distance of three or four city blocks. Isis Temple is said to be as great in mass as the mountainous part of Mt. Washington, and the summit of Isis looks down six thousand feet into the depths of a chasm, the ledges on the side being "as impracticable as the face of Bunker Hill Monument."
It is a noticeable fact, and one which the general reader may regard with quiet amusement, that all the writers who even attempt to allude to the Grand Cañon quote copiously from each other; and this is the almost inevitable instinct of each, in order to reinforce himself with authority for statements which, to those who have not themselves gazed upon this Carnival of the Gods, would sound incredible even to the verge of the wildest extravaganza. Major Powell's vivid transcription of his thrilling journey through the cañon, sailing through the boiling, rushing river whose torrents constantly threatened to engulf his boats,—Major Powell's transcription stands for itself alone; it was not only the pictured scenes of a writer, but the scientific report of an official government explorer; but since this,—and from Major Powell's narrative every writer invariably quotes,—since this, the writers quote from each other; they use each other's statements as evidence which they cite in order to support their own statements regarding a marvel so unspeakably phenomenal that the most literal and statistical description reads like an Arabian Nights romance. Then, too, the array of pen-pictures is interesting. A writer who coined wonderful descriptive phrases is Mr. C. A. Higgins. Of the silent transformations of the cañon when it "sinks into mysterious purple shadow" he said: "The far Shinumo Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a leaden horizon the long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft brilliance of indescribable beauty, a light that, elsewhere, surely never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls," he continues, "and should there be a moon, the scene in part revives in silver light a thousand spectral forms projected from inscrutable gloom; dreams of mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal." Others who have written of the Grand Cañon are: Harriet Monroe, whose poet's pen is dipped in the colors of an artist's palette; George Wharton James; and Mr. Charles S. Gleed, a distinguished lawyer of Topeka, who thus described the Cañon's wonders:
"Surrendering our minds to the magic spell of that mighty chasm, what pictures troop before us! Yonder see Gibraltar, giant sentinel of the Mediterranean. There on long ledges are St. Peter's and St. Paul's, Niagara, the Pyramids, and the Tower of Pisa. Bracketed beyond are the great parliament houses of the world. Down below behold in life size the lesser mountains of our own land,—Washington, Monadnock, Mansfield, Lookout, and a thousand others. See in the distance a million colored pictures of the Alps, the Adirondacks, and the Sierras. On endless shelves, this way and that, behold the temples and cathedrals, the castles and fortresses of all time. See vast armies, the armies of the ages, winding up the slopes, and great navies manœuvring in the mirage-like distance. Here, indeed, the giant mind of Dante would have found new worlds to conquer; and Homer would have dreamed new dreams of gods and men, love and war, life and death, heaven and hell."
Hamlin Garland, in one of his prose-poems, has said:
"The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and the storm, will transform it into a splendor no mountain range can surpass. Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent lakes of mountain water. The traveller who goes out to the edge and peers into the great abyss sees but one phase out of hundreds. If he is fortunate, it may be one of its most beautiful combinations of color and shadow. But to know it, to feel its majesty, one should camp in the bottom and watch the sunset and the moonrise while the river marches from its lair like an angry lion."
Robert Brewster Stanton, a civil engineer whose original work has brought him prominently before the scientific world, followed Major Powell's explorations, twenty years later, with a surveying company of his own organization,—and Mr. Stanton is, indeed, the only explorer who has made the continuous journey the entire length of the Colorado River which Major Powell navigated for a thousand miles. It was in May of 1889 that Mr. Stanton and his men initiated this daring feat, and of one phase of the appearance of the cañon Mr. Stanton's glowing, eloquent pen recorded: