The Grand canyon of the Colorado, recurrent studies in impressions and appearances

Front matter

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THE GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO

Contents

Preface-Dedication v

CHAFTEB

I. The Rim 1

Chapter I The Rim

The unexpected happens at the Canyon. Surprise, wonder, amazement are looked for, but one hardly counts upon fear. In common with the average visitor, upon arrival you hurry up the steps from the station, pass along the front of the hotel, and go out at once to the Rim for a first view. You are impatient of delay in seeing this marvel of the world. Almost before you know it you are at the edge. The great abyss, without hint or warning, opens before your feet. For the moment the earth seems cleft in twain and you are left standing at the brink. As you pause there momentarily the rock platforms down below seem to heave, the buttes sway; even the opposite Rim of the Canyon undulates slightly. The depth yawns to engulf you. Instinctively you shrink back. If it were not for the presence of companions you might cry out.

Ah ! the terror of it !

And, worse than that, the mad attraction of it, the dread temptation that lies within it! The chasm repels and yet draws. What does it me;an? Why before this most prodigious beauty of the world does one feel tempted to leap over the edge ?

It is true you do not, but your heart pounds uncomfortably and perhaps you grow a little wheyfaced. For a moment you doubt your sanity and question if you are not on the knife-blade edge between the rational and the irrational. You hold tightly to a tree or the back of a bench and try to appear indifferent. But the mere suggestion is disturbing. Why should one think such mad thoughts here at the Canyon ?

After a few minutes perhaps you draw a step nearer and take a more cautious peep into the depth, A cliff-swallow cuts by your head with a quick flirt of wing and goes out over the edge. You watch him with a strange, apprehensive feeling. He will almost surely fall or be drawn down into that gulf. But no. He speeds on serenely, chases his fellows down into the depth, comes up again into the blue like a shaft shot from a bow. He is at home here, over or under the walls. He knows no fear or lure or temptation.

An Indian dog from the Hopi house near at hand trots along the edge looking for his master. Apparently he cares nothing about the precipice beside him. Instinctively he places his feet just

THE RIM right, whether travelling along the rocky Rim or along a trail in the forest. If one should take him by the collar and try to drag him or push him over the edge, a struggle and a fight would develop at once. He knows the cliff and has no notion of going over it either voluntarily or involuntarily. But he has no fear of it.

Presently you discover the dog's master out on a point of projecting rock — out on a pinnacle that seems almost as though it were tottering. He is wigwagging with a white flag to some party across the Canyon on the North Rim, ten miles or more away. He stands on the very verge of the pinnacle. A single misstep, a momentary dizziness, and he is over. But he stands perfectly still; he does not reel. He, too, is at home here at the Rim. He has no feeling of fear and not the slightest thought about suicide or insanity.

None of the Children of the Sun understand such a thing as attraction by repulsion. To fear the abyss and yet be possessed by a mad desire to plunge within it does not come into their heads. Nor do they know that subtler charm that draws stronger than dread — the delight of swaying out and down through that blue-violet air, swaying into eternity without a pause or interruption and with not a particle of doubt about the instant attainment of Nirvana ! Did not the followers of the

Emir Musa cast themselves down from the high walls of the City of Brass, crying to the houris below : " By Allah ! Thou art fair " ? Death does not always appear as a fleshless skull. It sometimes comes disguised as beauty and with the lure of the siren.

But does not that way lie madness? Is it the fear of the gulf so much as the fear of self — the fear that you may yield to an irrational impulse? You shrink back from the thought even more than from the fact and cling to your sanity with a more nervous grip than you have upon the back of the bench. Then gradually you return somewhat to yourself. The terror of the abyss is not in the Canyon but in your over-sensitive nerves. Civilization has keyed you up to the snapping-point, and here in the presence of a great sensation you feel the strain.

There is company for your misery just here, for almost every one at the Canyon for the first time knows this impulse. After a few days a normal poise is regained and perhaps you forget yourself in the greatness of your surroundings. Nature is always making repairs on the human as upon her other creations. She helps him back to sanity and sound nerves as soon as he leaves the house for the open. Still, even after you have arrived at selfcomposure you have an uneasy feeling about others.

THE RIM

You cannot bear to see any one standing too close to the edge. You look the other way. And any one doing stunts from a point of overhanging rock makes you angry. And rightly enough. The most expert climbers here at the Canyon crawl along ledges on their hands and knees where, if it were not for that sheer descent, they would walk upright and steadily. One takes precautions. Eventually he becomes like the swallow and the Indian — that is, fearless but not foolish.

The Canyon is perhaps what might be called a natural rather than an artificial hazard. There is a difference. It is not probable that the city dweller (or for that matter the dog or the Indian) will ever conquer a disagreeable feeling in looking over the edge of a thirty-story sky-scraper into a canyon street. That may be because there is possibly some madness in both the building and the street that spurs on his own incipient mania. But there is no madness in Nature and no terror in her precipices once we have the fumes of civilization out of our brain and have returned to the normal life.

That is not to say that Nature at the Canyon or elsewhere does not occasionally indulge in extravagances. The view from El Tovar (Plates 1, 2, 3) is, at the very start, anything but normal. The English visitor gasps over it and perhaps takes the next train out. Landscape to him means much foliage.

a sunlit lawn, flat water for reflection, distant hills, some bowling white clouds against a blue sky. That is usually considered a livable landscape. And so it is. But there is nothing livable, nothing intimate about the Canyon. It is not a park or coimtryside scene, but a spectacle, a panorama — Nature in her most dramatic mood using her pageant properties with a prodigality of splendor almost unthinkable. It is a tremendous show, and to carry it off effects are employed that may be thought little short of theatrical. To illustrate:

The rock forms are florid, fantastic, flamboyant, and yet planned on so vast a scale that they are impressive and commanding through sheer mass. The colors are hectic, sky-flushed, fire-fused, perhaps leached and bleached by rain or flung off in vivid tones by blazing sunlight. Sometimes a vermilion-red glows beside a fire-green, while at other times, so subtle is the blend that you cannot draw a line between gold and orange or purple and mauve. The lights shift almost like the footlights in a ballet, showing a silver, a saffron, a pink, a heliotrope. The mornings are perhaps all blue and gold; the evenings all rose and violet. As for the atmospheres, the Canyon depths will reveal aerial blues at almost any time, but at dawn and sunset the envelope may thicken to a haze of pale gold or lilac or purple, and with dusk it sinks into a strange night blue.

From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey.

Plate 1. THE BATTLESHIP FROM EL TOVAR.

jSIaricopa Point left, Dana Butte middle shadow, arenas in Red Wall in sunlight. Battleship right foreground.

THE RIM

The Colorado! Why, yes; this is the valley it has cut, and the River itself is down there, but you cannot see it! Vi^en later, from some projecting point, you gain a first glimpse of it there is some disappointment. It looks like a thread of golden metal inlaid at the bottom of a purple bed. Its surface appears smooth, but if you continue to look at it steadfastly you will notice tiny moving flecks of light upon it. These flecks and quivers are the foam-crests of waves. And as the wind shifts and eddies in toward you there comes up a faint and far roar — a sinking and rising roar. The swift-rushing river is dashing and flashing its way to the sea, but it is so far off that you grasp neither its form nor its fury.

In addition to these Canyon peculiarities the varying meteorological appearances are startling. The sunrises and the sunsets, especially in summer, are preternatural in their brilliancy and almost raving in their color splendor. Frequently on hot afternoons dark clouds drift across the Canyon, letting down great fringed sheets of rain that melt into silvery mists. Blue-violet lightning flashes down into the depth and runs in rivulets among the buttes. Rainbows not only arch the passing showers from Rim to Rim, but the spectrum hues sometimes appear at noonday, straight overhead in the iceclouds of the feathery cirrus, with no rain whatever falling and with no arching bow. The scene is sometimes varied still further by clouds that form within the Canyon and slowly rise toward the Rim, breaking and dissipating as they rise, or by fogs that bank the Canyon full to the lip; and far down to the east, where the river turns coming out of the Marble Canyon, is the Painted Desert, and out of that at sunset occasionally come clouds of sand, purple-hued, lightning-riven, reaching up to the clouds of heaven, marching with a roaring wind across the desert, across the Little Colorado, and spilling down into the Canyon from the height of Comanche Point.

The unusual and the spectacular are everywhere, for, all told, the Canyon is Nature^s most colossal piece of stage-setting. The Great Goddess has here put carmines on her cheeks, jewels at her throat, and robed herself in her most astounding livery. Day after day she stands in the great spot-light of the sun, revealing her majestic beauty and her incomparable splendor. Around her are golden and garnet hued walls, below her are purple depths, above her is the azure immensity. A rose-and-lilac atmosphere makes of them all a wondrous harmony. Serene she stands, as young, as radiant, and as beautiful as at the earliest day. Never for a moment does she lose her serenity. For all her gay display her repose is not ruffled. In the final

From a photograph, copyrighted by Fred Harvey.

Plate 2. BRIGHT ANGEL FROM EL TOVAR.

Battleship in shadow, Bright Angel Trail below, Turtlehead right middle distance, North Rim on horizon.

THE RIM 9

analysis that repose is, here as elsewhere, her most dominant and impressive quahty.

Naturally, after so much that is amazing and some that is harrowing, one at first is more or less bewildered. You cannot step out of the monotony of a railway-car and, walking a few steps, enter upon something that is the last word in grandeur and sublimity without catching your breath and gasping a bit. Some people stand and stare with their mouths ajar, some whistle or talk unconsciously to themselves, some sit down and softly swear. But all are bewildered. They cannot grasp it. Nature seems out of joint. The walls are all precipices, the buttes are all carved and isolated peaks, the colors are madly mixed, and as for that weird River, it is so deep-sunk in fire-rock that it cannot be seen, and, though it never ceases from roaring, it cannot be heard. Destruction, desolation, and silence are on every hand.

And so, bewildered and dazzled, you go in to breakfast.

But give yourself a little time and you will gain a different point of view. The scene will apparently readjust itself. You will understand that it is abnormal, dramatic, spectacular, and judge it accordingly. Then you will see that everything at the Canyon, and in this Great Plateau country out of which it is carved, is all of a piece and goes

10 THE GBAND CANYON

together quite perfectly. It is a different geological surface and period from what you have been accustomed to, but it is thoroughly harmonious within itself. Eventually you will see that the great cleft valley has majesty, the buttes and walls dignity, the strata waving grace, the colors both charm and sublimity. The Canyon comes together after its kind, making a harmonious, self-sustaining picture, ideally panoramic, and all the more impressive for its size, its brilliancy of light, and its burning color splendor.

Chapter II Magnitude And Scale

At first we cannot see things here at the Canyon for their vastness. The mind keeps groping for a scale of proportion — something whereby we can mentally measure. Standards of comparison break down and common experience helps us not at all. The size of Crater Lake in Oregon or Mt. Shasta in California is gathered somewhat from walking around it, but the more one walks about the Canyon the vaster it becomes. Distance seems boundless.

The two-foot rule has to be abandoned, and even the scale of miles seems to serve us but indifferently. We are told that the Canyon is a mile deep, that it is twelve or more miles across, that it is two hundred and twenty miles from the Marble Canyon to the Grand Wash; but how much does that mean to us? By the same token, Spencer Terrace and Fiske Butte make up a mere two-mile promontory that reaches out from the foot of Mt. Huethawali toward the River; but those two miles lead over a flat stone floor, hard as iron, and with the indication of many thousand feet of similar solid rock beneath it. The distance in miles means nothing, but the tread upon that bare rock, the feel of the foot, brings home an unforgettable impression of the solidity and substance of the earth's surface. No; figures do not help us. A painter who could not do a sum in vulgar fractions would comprehend the Canyon more readily than a mathematician.

We go back to comparisons with other scenes of huge proportions. We multiply the Yellowstone or the Yosemite and countersink the Himalayas, seeking a resemblance to the Great Gorge, but the imagination does not respond. The abrupt end of the Muir Glacier in Alaska offers faint suggestion of sheer descent, and the wall of the Catskills facing the Hudson indicates what the Canyon may become thousands of years hence; but the likenesses are strained and feeble. There are cliff walls in the Rockies more rugged than these, more gray and forbidding in color, more massive in sheer power; but again they evoke no imagery, sustain no analogy. The wonders of the world are brought forth in vain. There is no similarity. The Canyon is unique — in a category by itself.

Then spring up the grotesqueries of the multitude. Some one talks about the Washington Monument and how small it would look among these buttes; another puts a Brooklyn Bridge across the Inner Gorge; and perhaps a third arrives at a scale of size by throwing Niagara into the Canyon and then feigning to look for it with an operaglass. But again the mind does not rise to these exaggerated parallels. In fact it is rather deadened by them, as by the thousands of years it would take that railway-train to reach the nearest fixed star. It arrives at things in a more elementary way and is finally impressed by commoner facts, such, for instance, as the sage-brush on the Battleship (Plate 1) below you not being sage-brush but trees (pinyons) fifteen feet high, or the great length of time it takes an eagle to cross a side-canyon and finally swing up and alight on a pinnacle of rock.

Next in order is the architectural parallel — something that seems to meet with favorable reception in almost every quarter. It is usually associated with mythological allusion, and out of the two is squeezed a pseudo-poetry, a hybrid romance. It seems that years ago, when this country was young and defenseless, some people more or less in authority broke in on the Canyon and exhausted the pantheon of gods in giving names to the buttes and promontories; and now every one who talks or writes about the Canyon from necessity uses architectural term and mythological name to point his meaning. The result is that these enormous Canyon forms are dwarfed to the building plan of a

Buddhist temple and the great goddess Nature is put out of countenance by the blinking little divinities of India and Egypt.

The inadequacy, not to say absurdity, of such a parallel becomes apparent when it is realized that some of these buttes stand five thousand feet from base to summit and that no "temple/* past or present, measures up one-tenth of that height. The association does not enlarge but rather belittles the Canyon. For when one writes

" The robin^s breast Was colored like the sunset west "

the comparison appeals to the imagination and

makes of the robin^s breast something wonderfully

brilliant. But if one puts it the other way around

and writes

" The sunset west Was colored like the robin's breast "

the comparison of the greater to the less makes a very small and weak affair of the sunset west. Just so here in this stupendous slash in the earth's crust. The buttes and isolated points that have been looming heavenward in majestic isolation for thousands of years before the coming of the Pale Face, are not made more grand or comprehensible by likening them by name to the squat temples of Buddha or Shiva or Zoroaster.

From a photograph, copyrighted hy Fred Harvey.

Plate 3. BUTTES FROM EL TOVAR.

Battleship in shadow, Granite Gorge central, Shiva at left, Isis middle

distance, Cheops right.

And where, by the way, are the temples of Zoroaster? And what eye has seen a "tower'' of Set or of Ra? There were pylons in Egj^tian architecture but no towers, and the Fire- Worshippers may have had temples, but to-day the place thereof knows them no more. And in any event what have these dead-and-gone gods, what have such operatic divinities as Wotan and Brunhilde to do with this Western wonder? The "temples'' of the gods and beside them the "castles" of Guinevere and the Queen of Sheba ! What a lugging in by the ears of questionable characters !

Why, if it were necessary to put a brand on the Canyon walls and buttes, were they not named for the Indians, as "Coconino Plateau" or "Pima Point," or after the Spaniards, as "Tovar Butte," or with just plain descriptive titles, such as " Grand View" or "Cedar Mountain"? But evidently the parlor-car poet was abroad in the land and in consequence the mock-heroic and the absurd have been put upon the map. A series of numbers would have been less agonizing and quite as poetic.

Poetry and the Canyon ! How very far removed they are from one another! In the Harz Mountains or along the Rhine the legend clings about every rock and pool and river, and seems very fitting, quite in keeping with the gentle face that Nature there displays. But what legend is there about the Canyon, barring the devil lore of the Indians, that has ever obtained ? If you suppose it known and settled by humanity for a thousand years, you still cannot imagine it a place for fairies or poets or lovers. What impression could a Venus, a Lorelei, or an Isolde make here? In this great depth they would appear as the mere butterflies of minstrelsy.

Should one, however, go back and conjure up the enormous Genii of the Arabian Nights new possibilities would immediately arise. ^ Such gigantic forms and fantastic characters would be appropriate to the Canyon. You can imagine the Genie pent up in the Bottle, dragged ashore from the rushing waters of the Colorado, and when freed from the Bottle expanding in an enormous cloud-like form that would fill not only the Inner Gorge but the whole Canyon. With such a creation you find the spectacular meeting the spectacular. Both the Canyon and the Genie are abnormal, colossal, stupendous; they complement each other in scale and go together quite perfectly.

But mere man, whether romantic or otherwise, is no more here than a fly on St. Peter's dome — something too infinitesimal to be reckoned with. He is not to the Canyon born and has less footing in it than the coyote whelped in the wind-worn pockets under the Rim or the jack-rabbit that is bred on Its lower terraces. And we, if we would understand the Canyon, must largely eliminate the human element of it. It is insignificant. We can get on without it.

With no adequate scale of proportion for form, we are perhaps even worse off when it comes to color. For the spread of it here outruns all oiu* experience. The cleft of the Yellowstone is a colored ditch in the forest and the Garden of the Gods a front-lawn display compared with it. The Canyon has all their variety and many times their quality. At sunset, with the western sky aflame, the whole violet arch of the upper space seems to fling down its brilliancy on this Plateau Country, turning forest, desert, and Canyon into a wide ring of splendor. From butte to butte, from Point Sublime to Cape Final, the great depth glows as though inlaid with patines of precious metal and studded with half-hidden jewels. The Coconino walls turn golden, the Red walls are salmon-hued, the Tonto platforms Nile-green, the Unkar beds vermilion-red, the Inner Canyon heliotrope-purple.

These hues run along cliff and butte and point and platform in unending sequence. There seems no limit to their volume. Over on the Painted Desert (Plate 33) and along the Rim of the Marble Canyon the sun-shafts and the sky reflection repeat the tale in tones of opal and iridescent fire.

Even the San Francisco Mountains, far away to the southeast, respond with an alpen glow from their snowy summits. There never was such another story of color.

To compare this display to the sea at sunset is not to gain in size, for the horizon ring there is not so great as here; and it is not to gain in color, since the local hue of the sea is blue-green and the Canyon in its rock strata has a thousand local hues to rival it. The sea does not help us to comprehension, and, as a matter of fact, no one ever thinks of it at the Canyon. Nor do we gain any greater understanding by calling the depth "a blue abyss" or *'a color dream." The phrases merely point to our helplessness in expression. We can do little more than stare at it and wonder.

The wonder is that with this immense gamut of tones there is no false note, no discord. How does it happen? Every stratum in the Canyon has a distinct local note and brings in a separate tale with the blare of a thousand bugles blown. Waves of scarlet and gold seem set in motion by the rising and the setting sun, the light-shot clouds overhead fling down reflections of topaz and amethyst, the cobalt sky and the blue-green forest are the reverberating backgrounds. How does it happen that these great areas of apparently opposed hues come together and fuse in a perfect harmony ?

Is it, perhaps, the atmosphere that strains the notes and causes the blend? That atmosphere is colored, too, and within an hour's time may pass from saffron to rose, or from violet to purple. As the air changes, the hues of the walls and buttes change to correspond. Dramatic and even theatrical as is this display, it is always in such perfect harmony and upon such a huge scale that the senses become more or less intoxicated and people grow ecstatic. They exclaim, or tears come to their eyes, or they choke up with emotion — suflScient proof, perhaps, of the fact that they are in the presence of stupendous beauty.

Form and color are not the only immensities that one meets at the Canyon. You are up from the sea seven thousand feet, but the sky is no nearer to you. Look at it a moment and how very deep it seems. You may know its depth by the quality of the blue. It is much darker than down at sea-level, and is, in fact, faintly tinged with violet. How the arch seems to lift into injSnite space! Have you ever seen so high a sky? And how low down the horizon rim! Standing on the point of Grand View it swings around you in a perfect circle. You are the centre of the circle and on a level with its lowermost edge. From this point you can easily see Navaho Mountain a hundred miles away to the northeast over the Painted Desert. That is only one-half the circle. Looking down to the southwest you can see, on the edge of the horizon, mountain ranges that are another hundred miles away. That is the other half of the circle. One keeps on insisting that everything at the Canyon is on a scale quite outside of normal experience.

And yet with all this colossal scale the forms and colors are rightly proportioned each in itself and in relation to the others. At first you may be absorbed by the great depth of the Canyon. You keep gazing down into the abyss and marvelling over the tremendous trench that Nature has dug. But the depth of the trench is exactly right in relation to its width and length. If you narrowed its breadth, you would feel a lack of proper balance. The proportions of the Inner Gorge to the Tonto platforms and the platforms to the upper walls would be lost; the Canyon would appear as a mere crack in the earth's crust. Just so with the colors. The warm colors — the reds, golds, and yellows — seem to predominate, but they are rightly tempered and harmonized by the cool colors — the greens and blues. Once more there is unity of effect.

And, finally, the combination of all these constituent parts — form, color, air, and sky — is again quite perfect. Each element, vast in itself, goes out and meets the other elements and blends with them into a complete whole. The great size

From a photograph by A. J. Baker, copyrighted by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad.

Plate 4. CATHEDRAL STAIRS, HERMIT TRAIL.

Pima Point right, Cope Butte left foreground. Granite Gorge central, seen across ragged cut, buttes in distance.

and the great blend give us what we call the sublime.

Well, it might be thought that out of these huge elements would come a hum, a hymn,

"The stretched metre of an antique song"

that was once sacred to Orpheus. But no. A silence reigns everywhere. The sun comes up over the Painted Desert through a haze of spectrum colors but there is no sound, and it goes down over the Uinkaret Mountains in all the glory of crimson and purple, but the silence is not broken. In the early morning you may hear at certain places the respiration of the River, or the sough of the pinyons along the Rim, or the jangle of the jays in the pines, but they are only momentary happenings. There may be flying shadows of clouds moving across the Canyon, or misty rain falling into its depths (Plate 27), but these are silent things that creep in and out with an imperceptible footfall. The huge taluses under the upright walls indicate that blocks of limestone and sandstone are continually falling — being pried off the face of the walls by frost and heat. They keep gathering upon the slopes below, but you seldom, if ever, see them fall, and, quite as seldom hear them. In the Alps one wakens in the summer nights with the slide and roar of avalanches, but at the Canyon one feels no shock, is conscious of no sound. The stillness seems like that of stellar space.

X And out of the silence perhaps one gathers the feeling of repose. It is in contrast with a feeling that there is more or less of chaos and destruction going on here. Nature at the Canyon is tearing down rather than building up. But in her economydeath is just as much a part of the Plan as life. For her own purposes she broods and rears and elevates, and equally for her own purposes she levels, she sweeps away, she destroys. Neither working of the Plan disturbs her poise or ruffles her composure for a moment. Everything is done with calmness. A day or a thousand years — what matters it to her ! In the fulness of time everything comes to pass as appointed. Therefore is there peace, and with it repose and silence — the silence that suggests eternity.