beside which the “shake” at Charleston was mere paper-doll play; for all the steepest gradients in the world (and Peru is the only place in the world where a river falls 17,000 feet in 100 miles)—in all that marvelous 3,000-mile procession of giantism there is not one canyon which any sane person would for an instant compare with that titanic gash that the Colorado has chiseled through a comparatively flat upland. Nor is there anything remotely approaching it in all the New World. So much I can say at first hand. As for the Old World, the explorer who shall find a gorge there one-half as great will win undying fame.
The quebrada of the Apu-Rimac is a marvel of the Andes, with its vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand Canyon of th Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the mountains. The Franconia and White Mountain notches in New Hampshire are beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world, each in its way. But if all of these were hung up on the opposite wall of the Grand Canyon from you the chances are fifty to one that you could not tell t’other from which, nor any of them from the hundreds of other canyons which rib that vast vertebrate gorge. If the falls of Niagara were installed in the Grand Canyon between your visits and you knew it by the newspapers—next time you stood on that dizzy rimrock you would probably need good field-glasses and much patience before you could locate that cataract which in its place looks pretty big. If Mount Washington were plucked up bodily by the roots—not from where you see it, but from sea-level—and carefully set down in the Grand Canyon, you probably would not notice it next morning, unless its dull colors distinguished it in that innumerable congress of larger and painted giants.
All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand Canyon. But I fancy there is no standard adjustable to the human mind. You may compare all you will—eloquently and from wide experience, and at last all similes fail. The Grand Canyon is just the Grand Canyon, and that is all you can say. I never have seen anyone who was prepared for it. I never have seen anyone who could grasp it in a week’s hard exploration; nor anyone, except some rare Philistine, who could even think he had grasped it. I have seen people rave over it; better people struck dumb with it, even strong men who cried over but I have never yet seen the man or woman that expected it.
It adds seriously to the scientific wonder and the universal impressiveness of this unparalleled chasm that it is not in some stupendous mountain range, but in a vast, arid, lofty floor of nearly 100,000 square miles—as it were, a crack in the upper story of the continent. There is no preparation for it. Unless you had been told, you would no more dream that out yonder amid the pines the flat earth is slashed to its very bowels, than you would expect to find an iceberg in Broadway. With a very ordinary running jump from the spot where you get your first glimpse of the canyon you could go down 2,000 feet without touching. It is sudden as a well.
But it is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 fect deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. It is like a dissection of the whole cosmogony. And the purple shadows, the dazzling lights, the thunderstorms and snowstorms, the clouds and the rainbows that shift and drift in that vast subterranean arena below your25
