The Greatest Thing in the World
By Charles F. Lummis
“The greatest thing in the world.” That is a large phrase and an over-worked one, and hardened travelers do not take it lightly upon the tongue. Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those but lately, and for the first time, wandered beyond their native state or county, and as every province has its own local brag of biggest things, the too credulous tourist will find a superlative everywhere. And superlatives are unsafe without wide horizons of comparison.
Yet in every sort there is, of course, somewhere “the biggest thing in the world” of its kind, It is a good word, when spoken in season and not abused in careless ignorance.
I believe there is and can be no dispute that the term applies literally to several things in the immediate region of the Grand Canyon of Arizona. As I have more than once written (and it never yet has been controverted), probably no other equal area on earth contains so many supreme marvels of so many kinds—so many astounding sights, so many masterpieces of Nature’s handiwork, so vast and conclusive an encyclopedia of the world-building processes. So impressive monuments of prehistoric man, so many triumphs of man still in the tribal relation—as what I have called the Southwestern Wonderland. This includes a large part of New Mexico and Arizona, the area which geographically and ethnographically we may count as the Grand Canyon region. Let me mention a few wonders:
The largest and by far the most beautiful of all petrified forests, with several hundred square miles whose surface is carpeted with agate chips and dotted with agate trunks two to four feet in diameter; and just across one valley a buried “forest” whose huge silicified—not agatized—logs show their ends under fifty feet of sandstone.
The largest natural bridge in the world—200 feet high, over 500 feet span, and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on its top and miles of stalactite caves under its abutments.
The largest variety and display of geologically recent volcanic action in North America; with 60-mile lava flows, 1,500-foot blankets of creamy tufa23
