GRAND CAÑON, FROM GRAND VIEW POINT
The air is the most bracing, exhilarating, and exquisite imaginable. The great rolling mesas covered with pine forests are more than seven thousand feet above the sea, and their exhilarating and tonic properties are beyond description. The entire atmosphere is fragrant with the pines. Throat and chest are bathed in balm and healing. There can hardly be any difficulty with the bronchial and breathing mechanism that cannot find its cure here. And the charm, the utter enchantment of living on this rainbow-tinted cañon, a mile and a half deep, thirteen miles across at this "Bright Angel" point (and this is its narrowest place), the joy of life is to steep one's self in the atmosphere of enchanting loveliness; and this perpetual play of color is an experience that finds no interpretation in language.
On first alighting from the branch of the Santa Fé that runs from Williams, Arizona, to Bright Angel, at the head of Bright Angel Trail on the Grand Cañon,—a three hour's ride of transcendent beauty among the purple peaks of the San Francisco mountains,—on first stepping from the train up the terrace to the beautiful "El Tovar" built on the very rim of the cañon, one objects strenuously to entering the hotel. His eye has caught the Vision,—a "celestial Inferno bathed in soft fires?" or the "Promised Land?" or the mystical vision that John saw on the Island of Patmos? The hotel would, presumably, remain; but this spectacle,—what can it be save a mirage, one never seen before on earth and perhaps not to be too confidently anticipated in Paradise? Would such a picture remain? Can one safely leave a sunset which is all a miracle of splendor while he goes in to dine? Can he safely turn away from the heavens when a young moon at night is winging her way down the sky and expect to find her midway in the heavens? And could one safely leave this most marvellous scene of all while he should bestow himself in his rooms?
"Would the Vision there remain?
Would the Vision come again?"
ZIGZAG, BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, GRAND CAÑON, ARIZONA
Could it be, in the very nature of things, any more permanent than any other momentary revelation of an enchanted hour that would fade into the darkness as night came on, like the splendor of a sunset, the color-scheme of a rainbow, or the glory and the freshness of a dream?
Instead, the Grand Cañon prefigures itself to one as an apparition, and while he may gaze upon it under all changing lights of dawn, of noonday, of sunset—and of moonlight—he cannot come to any realization that it is there all the time. His room in the hotel may look out into it and over it; and, waking in the night, he rises and leans out of his window to see if it is still there. One does not expect a vision of the New Jerusalem, a palpitating, changing, flaming, throbbing sea of color—in its rose-reds, its greens, its amber, gold, and purple—to remain like a field or a forest. It seems a thing of conditions, visible at one moment, vanished, perchance, the next.