cut by scores of canyons; hundreds of craters and thousands of square miles of lava beds, basalt, and cinders, and so much “volcanic glass” (obsidian) that it was the chief tool of the prehistoric population.
The largest and the most impressive villages of cave-dwellings in the world, most of them already abandoned “when the world-seeking Genoese” sailed.
The peerless and many-storied cliff-dwellings—castles and forts and homes in the face of wild precipices or upon their tops—an aboriginal architecture as remarkable as any in any land.
The twenty-six strange communal town republics of the descendants of the “cliff-dwellers,” the modern Pueblos; some in fertile valleys, some (like Acoma and Moki) perched on barren and dizzy cliff tops. The strange dances, rites, dress, and customs of this ancient people who had solved the problem of irrigation, 6-story house building, and clean self-government, and even women’s rights—long before Columbus was born.
The noblest Caucasian ruins in America, north of Mexico—the great stone and adobe churches reared by Franciscan missionaries, near three centuries ago, a thousand miles from the ocean, in the heart of the Southwest.
Some of the most notable tribes of savage nomads—like the Navajos, whose blankets and silver work are pre-eminent, and the Apaches, who, man for man, have been probably the most successful warriors in history.
All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland without a parallel, There are ruins as striking as the storied ones along the Rhine, and far more remarkable, There are peoples as picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural wonders which have no peers whatever.
At the head of the list stands the Grand Canyon of the Colorado; whether it is the “greatest wonder of the world” depends a little on our definition of “wonder.” Possibly it is no more wonderful than the fact that so tiny a fraction of the people who confess themselves the smartest in the world have ever seen it. As a people we dodder abroad to see scenery incomparably inferior.
But beyond peradventure it is the greatest chasm in the world, and the most superb. Enough globe-trotters have seen it to establish that fact. Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness thereof. But I never knew the most self-satisfied veteran traveler to be disappointed in the Grand Canyon, or to patronize it. On the contrary, this is the very class of men who can best comprehend it, and I have seen them fairly break down in its awful presence.
I do not know the Himalayas except by photograph and the testimony of men who have explored and climbed them, and who found the Grand Canyon an absolutely new experience. But I know the American continents pretty well, and have tramped their mountains, including the Andes—the next highest mountains in the world, after half a dozen of the Himalayas—and of all the famous quebradas of the Andes there is not one that would count 5 per cent on the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. For all their 25,000-foot peaks, their blue-white glaciers, imminent above the bald plateau, and green little bolsones (“pocket valleys”) of Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador; for all their tremendous active volcanoes, like Saugay and Cotopaxi; for all an earthquake activity24
