“Oh, I do not see how anything can be so grand, so awesome as this!” she cried, gazing up the precipices. “It makes me positively giddy to look at such heights!”
“Better stop off for a while,” advised Blake. “We are almost to where the bottom tilts skyward. You can stargaze while we are eating lunch. It’s rougher along here. We can get on faster this way.”
He picked her up in his arms as though she were a feather, and carried her on up the gulch to the foot of the Titanic chute. Here, resting on a flat rock in the cool semi-twilight of the gorge bottom, they ate their lunch and talked with as much zest as if they were still new acquaintances.
“Those awful cliffs!” she murmured, lowering her gaze from the colossal walls above her. “I cannot bear to look at them any longer. They overpower me!”
“Wait till you look down into the cañon,” replied her husband. “In some ways it is more tremendous than the Grand Cañon of the Colorado––the width is so much narrower in proportion to the depth.”
“What makes these frightful chasms?––earthquakes?” 223
“Water,” he replied.
“Water? Not all these hundreds and thousands of feet cut down through the solid rock!”
“Every foot,” he insisted. “Think of water flowing along in the same bed and always washing sand and gravel and even bowlders downstream––grind, grind, grind, through the centuries and hundreds of centuries.”
“But there is no water here, Tom.”