What Men Have Said of the Canyon. Men have stood before it and called it "an inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires;" but what is an inferno? And who ever saw the fires of heaven? Words! words! words! Charles Dudley Warner, versed in much and diverse world-scenery, mountain-sculpture, canyon-carvings, and plain-sweep, confessed: "I experienced for a moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be alone in such a presence. With all its grotesqueness and majesty of form and radiance of color, creation seemed in a whirl." When the reader thinks of grotesqueness, what images come to his mind? A Chinese joss, perhaps; a funny human face on the profile of a rock, but nothing so vast, so awful, so large as this. The word "majesty" suggests a kingly presence, a large man of dignified mien, or a sequoia standing supreme over all other trees in the forest. But a thousand men of majesty could be placed unseen in one tiny rift in this gorge, and all the sequoias of the world could be planted in one stretch of this Canyon, and never be noticed by the most careful watcher on the rim.
Another, reaching the Canyon at night, declared that she and her companions seemed to be "standing in midair, while below, the dark depths were lost in blackness and mystery." Again mere words! words! For whoever stood in mid-air?
Still another calls it "the most ineffable thing that exists within the range of man," and later explains when he stands on the brink of it; "And where the Grand Canyon begins, words stop." Yet he goes on and uses about four more pages of words, and pictures after words have stopped, to tell what he felt and saw. And the remarkable thing is that his experience is that of all the wisest men who have ever seen it. They know they cannot describe it, but they proceed to exhaust their vocabularies in talking about it, and in trying to make clear to others what they saw and felt. And in this very fact what a wonderful tribute lies to the power of the Canyon;that a wise and prudent man is led to strive to do what he vows he will not do, and knows he cannot do.
One well-known poet exclaims: "It was like sudden death." yet she is still alive. Again, after breakfast, she wrote: "My courage rose to meet the greatness of the world." Then she "crawled half prostrate" to the barest and highest rocks she could find on the rim, and confessed: "It made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes here; in these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits must range and soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring." Yet here I have heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse ravings of angry men--none of them impressed as was the soul of the poet.
One money-making business man declared that he went to the rim at night-time, and when he and his friends reached the spot they put forth their hands and found--"an absolute end. We clutched vainly at black space.
To fathom this space we thrust over a big stone. No sound came back. The pit was bottomless--the grave of the world. The mystery fascinated, the void beckoned. We scarcely knew why we did not obey the summons--why we did not abandon the present, and, by following the big stone, escape to the future." And yet he had no urgent creditors bothering him. His financial position was secure and unquestioned. His family relations were all that could be desired. Wonderful, indeed, that a mere feature of natural scenery could have led him to wonder why he didn't leave all the luxuries and certainties of life, and leap into the unknown future! Yet that is just the way the Canyon affected a sober business man of steady judgment.
A well-known writer declares: "It is a paradox of chaos and repose, of gloom and radiance, of immeasurable desolation and enthralling beauty. It is a despair and a joy; a woe and an ecstasy; a requiem and a hallelujah; a world-ruin and a world-glory--everything in antithesis of such titanic sort." I agree with him, and regard his expressions as indicative of my own sensations.
