The term "cañon" is a misnomer for this supreme marvel of earth. One journeys to it anticipating a colossal variation on Cheyenne Canon or the Royal Gorge. Instead, what does the tourist see?
The ridge of a vast mountain-chain over two hundred miles in length split asunder in a yawning chasm eighteen miles in width and over seven thousand feet deep; one in which a thousand Niagaras would be lost; in which a cliff that, relatively to the scene, does not impress one as especially lofty, yet which exceeds in height the Eiffel Tower in Paris; and another which does not arrest special attention, yet is taller than the Washington Monument. But the splendor of apparent architectural creations arrests the eye. "Solomon's Temple," the "Temple of Vishnu," and altars, minarets, towers, pagodas, colonnades, as if designed by architectural art, lie grouped in wonderful combinations of form and color.
"An Inferno, swathed in soft, celestial fires; a whole chaotic underworld, just emptied of primeval floods, and waiting for a new creative word; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet spectral as a dream, eluding all sense of perspective or dimension, outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of definite apprehension. The beholder is at first unimpressed by any detail; he is overwhelmed by the ensemble of a stupendous panorama, a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. 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 color known to the palette in pure transparent tones of marvellous delicacy. Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.
"The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human grasp. Something may be gleaned from the account given by geologists. What is known to them as the Grand Cañon district lies principally in northwestern Arizona, its length from northwest to southeast in a straight line being about one hundred and eighty miles, its width one hundred and twenty-five miles, and its total area some fifteen thousand square miles. Its northerly beginning, at the high plateaus in southern Utah, is a series of terraces, many miles broad, dropping like a stairway step by step to successively lower geological formations, until in Arizona the platform is reached which borders the real chasm and extends southward beyond, far into the central part of that territory. It is the theory of geologists that ten thousand feet of strata have been swept by erosion from the surface of this entire platform, whose present uppermost formation is the Carboniferous; the deduction being based upon the fact that the missing Permian, Mesozoic, and Tertiary formations, which belong above this Carboniferous in the series, are found in their place at the beginning of the northern terraces referred to. The theory is fortified by many evidences supplied by examination of the district, where, more than anywhere else, mother earth has laid bare the secrets of her girlhood. The climax in this extraordinary example of erosion is, of course, the chasm of the Grand Cañon proper, which, were the missing strata restored to the adjacent plateau, would be sixteen thousand feet deep. The layman is apt to stigmatize such an assertion as a vagary of theorists, and until the argument has been heard it does seem incredible that water should have carved such a trough in solid rock. It is easier for the imagination to conceive it as a work of violence, a sudden rending of earth's crust in some huge volcanic fury; but it appears to be true that the whole region was repeatedly lifted and submerged, both under the ocean and under a fresh-water sea, and that during the period of the last upheaval the river cut its gorge. Existing as the drainage system of a vast territory, it had the right of way, and as the plateau deliberately rose before the pressure of the internal forces, slowly, as grinds the mills of the gods, through a period to be measured by thousands of centuries, the river kept its bed worn down to the level of erosion; sawed its channel free, as the saw cuts the log that is thrust against it. Tributaries, traceable now only by dry lateral gorges, and the gradual but no less effective process of weathering, did the rest."
In the innermost depths of this colossal chasm runs the Colorado River. Descending the stupendous crags and terraces by one of the two or three "trails," the traveller at last stands upon a sandy rift confronted by nearly vertical walls many hundred feet high, at whose base a black torrent pitches in a giddying onward slide that gives him momentarily the sensation of slipping into an abyss.
"With so little labor may one come to the Colorado River in the heart of its most tremendous channel, and gaze upon a sight that heretofore has had fewer witnesses than have the wilds of Africa. Dwarfed by such prodigious mountain shores, which rise immediately from the water at an angle that would deny footing to a mountain sheep, it is not easy to estimate confidently the width and volume of the river. Choked by the stubborn granite at this point, its width is probably between two hundred and fifty and three hundred feet, its velocity fifteen miles an hour, and its volume and turmoil equal to the Whirlpool Rapids of Niagara. Its rise in time of heavy rain is rapid and appalling, for the walls shed almost instantly all the water that falls upon them. Drift is lodged in the crevices thirty feet overhead."
Descending to this ledge the tourist "can hardly credit Powell's achievement, in spite of its absolute authenticity. Never was a more magnificent self-reliance displayed than by the man who not only undertook the passage of the Colorado River, but won his way. And after viewing a fraction of the scene at close range, one cannot hold it to the discredit of three of Major Powell's companions that they abandoned the undertaking not far below this point. The fact that those who persisted got through alive is hardly more astonishing than that any should have had the hardihood to persist. For it could not have been alone the privation, the infinite toil, the unending suspense in constant menace of death that assaulted their courage; these they had looked for; it was rather the unlifted gloom of those tartarean depths, the unspeakable horrors of an endless valley of the shadow of death, in which every step was irrevocable....
"Not the most fervid pictures of a poet's fancy could transcend the glories revealed in the depths of the Cañon; inky shadows, pale gildings of lofty spires, golden splendors of sun beating full on façades of red and yellow, obscurations of distant peaks by veils of transient shower, glimpses of white towers half drowned in purple haze, suffusions of rosy light blended in reflection from a hundred tinted walls. Caught up to exalted emotional heights, the beholder becomes unmindful of fatigue. He mounts on wings. He drives the chariot of the sun."
The language is not yet invented that can suggest any adequate idea of the Grand Cañon. Nor can it be painted or photographed, or in any way pictorially reproduced in a manner to afford any suggestion, even, of its sublimity in design and its perpetual enchantment of color. One beholds the temples and towers and mosques and pagodas glowing in rose-red, sapphire blue, with emerald and amber and amethyst, all blending, and swimming, apparently, in a sea of purple, or of pearl gray mist, the colors flashing through like flame under alabaster. The sunlight changes as the day wears on, and so this play of color changes,—glowing, fading, paling, flaming. Watching these magical effects from dawn to sunset, watching the panorama of color as it deepens into mysterious shadows and spectral illusions under the moonlight, one can only say, "What hath God wrought!" To contemplate this marvellous and sublime spectacle is to come into a new perception of the Divine creation.