If one pauses for a moment with any sense of obligation to himself to gain some rationale of this cañon; if for a moment he turn from rhapsody and ecstasy and the dream of poet and painter to grope after statistical estimates, what does he find? One comparison is that,—
"If the Eiffel Tower, which with a height of almost a thousand feet is the tallest structure in the world, were placed at the bottom of the cañon in its deepest part, five more towers just like the first would have to be piled on top of one another to reach the rim of the plateau."
And again:
"Could the cañon be filled in for a building site, it would furnish room enough for fifty New York cities. Indeed, it would have an area of sixteen thousand square miles, equal to the whole of Switzerland, or the states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, and Rhode Island combined."
Statistical comparisons are, at best, a necessary evil which, once confronted, need not companion one further. It is beauty, it is sublimity, not mathematical assurances, that really lays hold on life. The inexplicable impressions made by this spectacle are mirrored in the following words:—
"As I grew familiar with the vision I could not quite explain its stupendous quality. From mountain tops one looks across greater distances and sees range after range lifting snowy peaks into the blue. The ocean reaches out into boundless space, and the ebb and flow of its waters have the beauty of rhythmic motion and exquisitely varied color. And in the rush of mighty cataracts are power and splendor and majestic peace. Yet for grandeur appalling and unearthly; for ineffable, impossible beauty, the cañon transcends all these. It is as though to the glory of nature were added the glory of art; as though, to achieve her utmost, the proud young world had commanded architecture to build for her and color to grace the building. The irregular masses of mountains, cast up out of the molten earth in some primeval war of elements, bear no relation to these prodigious symmetrical edifices mounted on abysmal terraces and grouped into spacious harmonies which give form to one's dreams of heaven. The sweetness of green does not last forever, but these mightily varied purples are eternal. All that grows and moves must perish, while these silent immensities endure."
The majestic panorama dominates every detail of daily life. As when in Bayreuth for the Wagner music-dramas alone, every other consideration is subordinated to these, so in life in El Tovar, on Bright Angel Trail, one's hours for sleep and for any daily occupations are held strictly amenable to "effects" in the mysterious splendor of the Titanic underworld. To see the cañon under the full moon; to see it when all the pinnacles of rock are leaping in rose-red flame under a sunrise; to see it in a dream of twilight as the purple canopy falls,—all these hours,—all hours are made for the magical transformations. With every breath of change of the atmosphere this celestial beauty changes. One is hardly conscious as to the special ways and means by which he finds himself in an enchanted world,—
"From the shore of souls arrived?"
It is very possible. Nor does he know how—or when—he shall depart. The past is effaced, and the future recedes into some unformulated atmosphere. Life, a thousand lifetimes, concentrate themselves in the present. A supreme experience has always this peculiarity,—that it bars out all the past and all the future. When one is on the Mount of Transfiguration, he is not scrutinizing the pathway by which he came nor that by which he may descend.
Even if one has seen the Grand Cañon before, he is surprised to find how absolutely newly created it is to him when its haunting magic draws him back. No enshrined memory can compare with the reality. In seeing the Petrified Forest one checks it off as a thing accomplished for life. It is definite. The great logs of agate and jasper and chalcedony lie on the ground as they have lain for perhaps thousands of ages. It is a wonder—the seventh wonder of the world, if one pleases and—the paradise of geologists, but it is unchanging. Not so the Grand Cañon. The cañon is a perpetual transformation scene. Its color effects rival those of an electric fountain under the full play of the spectroscope. It is rose, purple, amber, emerald, pearl gray, pale blue, scarlet—according to atmospheric states. One leaves it in the late afternoon with the rocky towers and pinnacles and battlements all in glowing scarlet, seen through a transparent air. He steps out upon the broad hotel piazzas an hour later and, behold, the uncalculated spaces of the cañon are filled with a half-transparent blue mist which envelops all the curious sandstone formations that gleam in pale rose and opal tints through this thin blue mist, and assume wraith-like shapes. Major Powell well said, that really to see the Grand Cañon, a year is necessary. Yet just as truly may it be said that even for two days it is worth crossing the continent to enjoy this most marvellous of spectacles. Only the scientist and the specialist dream of seeing it in anything like completeness. For the tourist and traveller a range of twenty miles is quite sufficient to disclose its representative beauty. A day's drive by the stage to Grandview Point, Hance's Trail, and Moran's Point is easily made between nine and five o'clock. A drive of two or three miles in the opposite direction will include Rowe's and O'Neil's points. One day will allow the adventurous tourist to "go down the trail." Still, after doing all these things, the best of all, it may be, is to live into the atmosphere. To draw one's chair out on the broad balcony of the new and beautiful hotel, El Tovar, and sit and dream and gaze and wonder, and wonder and gaze and dream, is, perhaps, the greatest joy one can have in all the time passed here, especially if the solitude can be the solitude à deux. No joy, no interest, is of much consequence until or unless it is sympathetically shared. As a décor de scène the Grand Cañon is unrivalled. The magic and mystery of all the universe broods over its Titanic spaces.