| Victoria Falls, Zambesi | Frontispiece |
| [FACING PAGE] | |
| Camel Carriages of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab | [32] |
| Strings of Firecrackers | [60] |
| Hexagonal Bundles of Firecrackers Drying in the Sun | [60] |
| View of Constantinople from the Galata Side | [170] |
TRAVEL STORIES
THE GRAND CAÑON OF ARIZONA
BY WILLIAM HASKELL SIMPSON
Many of those who seek and love earth's greatest scenery have declared that they found it at the Grand Cañon of Arizona. Travelers flock to it from the ends of the earth, though the majority of the visitors, numbering every year about a hundred thousand, are Americans.
The Grand Cañon of the Colorado River, in northern Arizona, is indeed a world wonder, and there is no other chasm in the world worthy to be compared with it. It is more than two hundred miles long, including Marble Cañon, is from ten to thirteen miles wide in the granite gorge section, and is more than a mile deep. It was created ages and ages ago by the erosive action of water, wind, and frost, and it is still being deepened and widened imperceptibly year by year.
The Colorado River, which drains a region of three hundred thousand square miles and is two thousand miles long from the rise of its principal source, is formed in southern Utah by the junction of the Grand and the Green Rivers, and, flowing through Utah and Arizona to tide-water at the Gulf of California, it dashes in headlong torrent through this titanic gorge—this dream of color, tinted like a rainbow or a sunset.
The cañon is reached by a railroad running to the rim, and may be visited any day in the year. It is unlike most other scenery, because when standing on its rim you look down instead of up. Imagine a gigantic trough, filled with bare mountains on each side and sloping to a narrow channel, which in turn is carved deeply and steeply out of solid granite. You come upon it unawares from the level, timbered, plateau country. The experience is an absolutely unique one. Only when you go down one of the trails to the bottom and look up is the view more nearly like other grand mountain vistas. The first glimpse always is from the upper edge, and, having no previous standard of measurement, you find it difficult to adjust yourself to this strange condition. The distant rim swims in a bluish haze. The nearer red rocks forming the inner cañon buttes—crowned with massive table-lands that look like temples, minarets, and battlements—reflect the sunlight in myriad hues. It seems a vast illusion rather than reality. No wonder that the first look often awes the spectator into silence and tears!
But, before you have been here long, you will wish to know how it all happened. You will ask how the cañon was made.