A CLIFF ON BRIGHT ANGEL TRAIL, GRAND CAÑON

From the brink one looks down a mile and a half into towers and pinnacles; one looks across eighteen miles in the widest place; and one looks up and down its tortuous length, as its complicated system of caÑons revealed themselves as far as the eye could see either way. One gazes, not into a deep, dark cleft, a Titanic royal gorge, but on and into a sea of color and a wealth of architectural wonders,—cathedrals, towers, mosques, pinnacles, minarets, temples, and balconies exceeding in variety of design, in extraordinary beauty of grouping and splendor of color, anything of which one could dream, even in his most enchanted moments. The red sandstone, the brilliant white of the limestone luminous under the setting sun, the green of pine trees or of copper rocks, the gray and ochre tints of gravel and fallen rocks and dÉbris, the soft, deep purple mist enveloping all as an atmosphere in which all these architectural marvels seemed to swim—the strange, unearthly splendor of it all—holds one under a fascination that can neither be analyzed nor described. This, then, is "El Grande CaÑon de la Colorado." One stands speechless, breathless, as if transported to some other planet. Suddenly all life—everything that floated in memory—seemed confused, unreal. Was the past (whose running series of incident and event and circumstance already seemed vague) a dream, and was this the reality? Or had there never been any reality in life before? Was this a dream, wrought under some untold spell of enchantment? Would one hear the water nixies chanting their refrain if he listened? Or was this scene of Titanic grandeur the abode of Wagner's gods and heroes? One watched for the sacred fires to flame on Brunhilde's rock and for Siegfried to appear. One saw the ship which had borne Tristan on his ill-starred voyage, and the garden where the lovers confessed their intense and instant love, and the fatal potion scene rises before him; and again he is lost in rapt ecstasy as the air seems filled with the passionate drama of Lilli Lehmann and Alvarez. For let Ternina and other younger women come and go in the Wagner music-drama, and yet where will that absolute perfection of dramatic action, that passionate exaltation of emotion, ever again attend and invest any singer as they invest and are identified with Lilli Lehmann?

In this most sublime of all earthly spectacles there are aËrial landscape effects as delicate and evanescent as a cloud-wreath, or as a fog that advances, wraith-like, to melt away into dissolving views. "The region is full of wonders and beauties and sublimities that Shelley's imaginings do not match in the 'Prometheous Unbound,'" wrote Charles Dudley Warner.

If the world realized the marvellous effects of this very Carnival of the Gods, the infinite spaces of the Grand CaÑon itself could not contain all who would eagerly throng to behold it. The statistical record of the increase of visitors is rather interesting. In 1900 there were eight hundred and thirteen; the succeeding year, six thousand eight hundred and eighty-three; while in 1903 the number increased to nearly one hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Since that date the number of visitors has multiplied itself after the fashion of compound interest. The establishment of all the conveniences and comforts, not to say luxuries, of modern travel may be one of the most potent factors in this increase of visitors. Until within five years the Grand CaÑon could only be reached by a stage ride of seventy miles through the Coconino Forest,—whose dim gray twilight reminds one of the forests of Fontainebleau,—and which drive, however romantically beautiful, was attended with too great terrestrial discomfort to commend it to general public service. Until 1906 the hotel accommodations, also, while offering a modest comfort, were essentially primitive; while now the superb new Harvey hostelry, "El Tovar," built at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars (and the Harvey name is a synonym in the West for everything admirable in dining cars, refreshment stands, and hotels), insures to every traveller any degree of luxurious comfort he requires. Even the man who, after visiting all the enchanted points in the Land of Enchantment, in its prehistoric period of twenty years ago before Pullman cars climbed the mountain peaks and the Waldorf-Astoria type of hotels sprang up, the man who, after a trip through these wonders of the world, returned to New York and declared that he would rather see an electric bell and a bath than all the grandeur between Pike's Peak and the Pacific, would now be fully reconciled to Western sojourns. He would find his electric bell and his bath to be as much a matter of course as in Fifth Avenue, besides also finding that there were spectacles,—as that of the Garden of the Gods, Cheyenne CaÑon, the Petrified Forests, the Grand CaÑon, and the Los Angeles electric trolley system (which quite deserves to rank with the modern "Seven Wonders" of the world), and which Fifth Avenue by no means provided for her votaries. In fact, "El Tovar" is so inclusive of comfort as to be fairly a feature of the caÑon, commanding, on one side, a magnificence of prospect without parallel in the world in the mighty chasm on whose brink it stands, on the other side the fragrant Coconino pine forest,—the largest belt of pine timber in the United States, and which has been made a government forest reservation.

There is now a project to erect a memorial to Major John W. Powell, the pioneer explorer of the Grand CaÑon, to be placed on the rim at the head of Bright Angel Trail at El Tovar. This most fitting plan to honor the name of the great scientist and explorer whose research contributed the first authoritative knowledge of the caÑon is the thought of the American Scenic Association, which will petition Congress to grant the requisite appropriation. No monument to human greatness could be more ideally placed than this to perpetually repeat to every visitor and sojourner the name of the explorer who successfully achieved the most startling and heroic journey in all history,—that made through the complete extent of the Grand CaÑon.

It was in 1869 that Major Powell, with four boats and nine men, inaugurated this expedition, starting from Green River City in Utah. He was dissuaded and importuned in the most urgent way by those most familiar with the region not to attempt the feat. The Indians especially insisted that no boat could live in any one of the score of rapids to be passed. There was also a tradition that for some hundreds of miles the river lost itself in the earth, and Major Powell and his men would thus be imprisoned within a Titantic fortress from which escape would be impossible. But men of destiny do not hesitate when they are led to great achievements. Major Powell set out on May 24, 1869, with his nine men and four boats, and landed on August 3, with four men and two boats, at the mouth of the Virgin River, after having sailed the boiling torrent of the Colorado River, at the bottom of the caÑon, for more than a thousand miles. Mr. C. A. Higgins characterizes this feat as "the most wonderful geological and spectacular phenomenon known to mankind."

The first authentic knowledge of the existence of the Grand CaÑon dates back to August of 1540, when the Spanish friar, Alvar NuÑez, after years of romantic wanderings among the pueblos of the Southwest, returned to Mexico with tales of this mighty chasm. Coronado, who had discovered the Seven Cities of Cibola (of which now only ZuÑi remains), ordered Garcia Lopez to take a band of men and Indian guides and search for this chasm, which he succeeded in discovering; with the more difficulty, surely, in that one has to gain its very rim before he has hardly an intimation of its proximity. The spectacle of the caÑon always presents itself as a sudden surprise. It was not, however, until 1884 that, by the building of the great transcontinental line, the Santa FÉ, the Grand CaÑon became accessible. Then for some twenty years it was reached, as has already been noted, by stage from Flagstaff. Now one can travel in his sleeper without change from Chicago to El Tovar, and thousands of tourists annually visit the extraordinary scene. Not the least of the interesting data regarding the caÑon is this gulf of more than three hundred years that divides its discovery from its taking rank as the most phenomenal scenic resort of the world. The mills of the gods grind slowly. The visitors to the Grand CaÑon present singularly cosmopolitan groups, there being hardly a country in the world that is not represented at some time during the year.

For the caÑon has all seasons for its own. It is almost as much of an object of winter as of summer pilgrimage. One season is found, on the whole, to be almost as enjoyable here as another. It is cool in summer, and it is warm and sunny in winter. Sometimes there is a fairy snowfall, but hardly more lasting than a spring frost, and when it comes it only adds another flitting variety to the stupendous scene.

With untold tons of the water of the Colorado River pouring itself in torrents through the bottom of the caÑon, all the water used for the table, for toilet, and for laundry purposes has to be brought from a distance of a hundred and twenty miles, and twenty thousand gallons are in daily use. An electric-light plant furnishes brilliant illumination.

The Hopi House, built in imitation of an Indian pueblo, with a group of quaintly garbed Hopi Indians within in attendance, is a curiosity; and besides the Hopis there are Navajos and Supais coming to sell their handiwork,—that of pottery, silver ornaments, blankets, and baskets. Cataract CaÑon, forty miles from El Tovar, is the home of the Supais, and it is a place that well repays visiting for an entirely new point of view of the vast caÑon that it affords. There are peaceful Indians to be seen daily riding their horses through the pine woods, journeying from El Tovar to Grand View, to "Hance's Trail," to "Moran's Point," and other localities, to sell or barter their wares. One old Indian who seems to roam about alone has developed an ingenious manner of procuring food when he is hungry. He enters the hotel office and seeks the proprietor himself, recognizing with unerring instinct that this gentleman's liberal endowment of sympathy and unfailing generosity never permits him to "turn down" a request for aid. The wily old savage seeks him out and makes conspicuous overtures of his affection.

"You is heap my son; pale face heap my son!" the dusky visitor declares, and when this assurance is emphasized to the proprietor he realizes that it means he is "heap my son" because his visitor is hungry. These outbursts of devotion occur only when the old Indian is at his wits' end to know where to procure something to eat. Once fed he is off, and thinks no more of the man whom he assured that he was "heap my son" until hunger again assails him and stimulates his parental affection.So the little trifles and pleasantries of the comÉdie humaine assert their place in the general life even on the rim of the sublime spectacle of the Carnival of the Gods.

For more than two hundred miles the caÑon offers its innumerable panoramas, no one ever duplicating that of another. There are thousands of caÑons in it—it is a complicated system of colossal caÑons. Every wall is an aggregation of hundreds of walls. Every pinnacle is formed of hundreds of pinnacles. When the sun shines in splendor on the vermilion walls, the glory is almost beyond what man can bear. When from the trail below a star seems to float in the air and rest on the verge of the cliff, what words can convey any image of this ineffable beauty?

The cloud-effects are another of the phases of faËry. A rain creates a panorama of clouds creeping out of one caÑon and flying into another, all "as if they had souls and wills of their own," says Major Powell; and he adds, "In the imagination the clouds belong to the sky, and when they are in the caÑon the skies come down into the gorges and cling to the cliffs and lift them up to immeasurable heights, for the sky must still be far away; thus they lend infinity to the walls." The caÑon mirrors the color and the state of the sky as water does. This is one of the most curious facts connected with it. "Yet form and color do not exhaust all the divine qualities of the Grand CaÑon," continues Major Powell; "it is the land of music. The river thunders in perpetual roar, swelling in floods of music when the storm-gods play upon the rocks, and fading away in soft and low murmurs when the infinite blue of heaven is unveiled.... The adamant foundations of the earth have been wrought into a sublime harp upon which the clouds of heaven play with mighty tempests or with gentle showers."

Major Powell, the explorer and practically the modern discoverer of the caÑon, remains its most complete interpreter. His journal narrating that remarkable voyage through the Colorado River in a region "more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas," is fairly an epic in American literature. He had the vision of the painter and the heart of the poet. He felt that infinitely complex variety of the caÑon, and he read its sublime inscriptions on a scroll not made with hands. He pictures one feature especially that has hardly been touched by other writers,—that of the perpetually changing aspects. "One moment as we looked out over the landscape," he writes, "the atmosphere seemed to be trembling and moving about, giving the impression of an unstable land: plains and hills and cliffs and distant mountains seemed vaguely to be floating about in a trembling, wave-rocked sea; and patches of landscape would seem to float away and be lost, and then reappear.... The craggy buttes seem dancing about.... The sun shone in splendor on the vermilion walls. Shaded into green and gray when the rocks were lichened over, the river filled the channel from wall to wall, and the caÑon opened like a beautiful doorway to a region of glory. But at evening, when the sun was going down and the shadows were settling in the caÑon, the scarlet gleams and roseate hues, blended with tints of green and gray, slowly changed to sombre brown above and black shadows crept over them from below.... Lying down, one looked up through the caÑon and saw that only a little of the blue heavens appeared overhead,—a crescent of blue sky with but two or three constellations peering down upon us. Soon I saw a bright star that appeared to rest on the verge of the cliffs overhead, and, as it moved up from the rock, I almost wondered that it did not fall, and indeed it appeared as if swayed down by its own weight. The star appeared to be in the caÑon, so high were the walls."

So the wonderful story of Major Powell's runs on of these atmospheric phenomena of the caÑon, effects that

It is from Bright Angel Trail that the Grand CaÑon is the most accessible. Parties of men and women, mounted on sure-footed burros, go down this trail with their guides—apparently under the special protection of the bright angels of the celestial host, as no accident has ever, thus far, occurred. Prof. George Wharton James notes, in his invaluable work on the Grand CaÑon,[5] that this trail was originally used by the Havasupai Indians and that the rude irrigating canals that conveyed water from an adjacent spring to a so-called Indian Garden in the near vicinity are still to be seen. The view from the head of Bright Angel Trail is one of vast extent and a peculiar sublimity. Buddha Temple is a colossal pile that rises in isolated grandeur, and near it is Buddha Cloister. An impressive tower of rock rising in the caÑon bears the honored name of Agassiz. Isis Temple and the Temple of Brahma are within the range of the eye from this point. The perfectly transparent air, and that absence of aËrial vibration that characterizes the atmosphere of Arizona, conspire to invest all distance with magic illusion. Looking across the thirteen miles of the caÑon's abyss from Bright Angel Trail, the opposite rim hardly seems farther away than the distance of three or four city blocks. Isis Temple is said to be as great in mass as the mountainous part of Mt. Washington, and the summit of Isis looks down six thousand feet into the depths of a chasm, the ledges on the side being "as impracticable as the face of Bunker Hill Monument."

It is a noticeable fact, and one which the general reader may regard with quiet amusement, that all the writers who even attempt to allude to the Grand CaÑon quote copiously from each other; and this is the almost inevitable instinct of each, in order to reinforce himself with authority for statements which, to those who have not themselves gazed upon this Carnival of the Gods, would sound incredible even to the verge of the wildest extravaganza. Major Powell's vivid transcription of his thrilling journey through the caÑon, sailing through the boiling, rushing river whose torrents constantly threatened to engulf his boats,—Major Powell's transcription stands for itself alone; it was not only the pictured scenes of a writer, but the scientific report of an official government explorer; but since this,—and from Major Powell's narrative every writer invariably quotes,—since this, the writers quote from each other; they use each other's statements as evidence which they cite in order to support their own statements regarding a marvel so unspeakably phenomenal that the most literal and statistical description reads like an Arabian Nights romance. Then, too, the array of pen-pictures is interesting. A writer who coined wonderful descriptive phrases is Mr. C. A. Higgins. Of the silent transformations of the caÑon when it "sinks into mysterious purple shadow" he said: "The far Shinumo Altar is tipped with a golden ray, and against a leaden horizon the long line of the Echo Cliffs reflects a soft brilliance of indescribable beauty, a light that, elsewhere, surely never was on sea or land. Then darkness falls," he continues, "and should there be a moon, the scene in part revives in silver light a thousand spectral forms projected from inscrutable gloom; dreams of mountains, as in their sleep they brood on things eternal." Others who have written of the Grand CaÑon are: Harriet Monroe, whose poet's pen is dipped in the colors of an artist's palette; George Wharton James; and Mr. Charles S. Gleed, a distinguished lawyer of Topeka, who thus described the CaÑon's wonders:

"Surrendering our minds to the magic spell of that mighty chasm, what pictures troop before us! Yonder see Gibraltar, giant sentinel of the Mediterranean. There on long ledges are St. Peter's and St. Paul's, Niagara, the Pyramids, and the Tower of Pisa. Bracketed beyond are the great parliament houses of the world. Down below behold in life size the lesser mountains of our own land,—Washington, Monadnock, Mansfield, Lookout, and a thousand others. See in the distance a million colored pictures of the Alps, the Adirondacks, and the Sierras. On endless shelves, this way and that, behold the temples and cathedrals, the castles and fortresses of all time. See vast armies, the armies of the ages, winding up the slopes, and great navies manoeuvring in the mirage-like distance. Here, indeed, the giant mind of Dante would have found new worlds to conquer; and Homer would have dreamed new dreams of gods and men, love and war, life and death, heaven and hell."

Hamlin Garland, in one of his prose-poems, has said:

"The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and the storm, will transform it into a splendor no mountain range can surpass. Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent lakes of mountain water. The traveller who goes out to the edge and peers into the great abyss sees but one phase out of hundreds. If he is fortunate, it may be one of its most beautiful combinations of color and shadow. But to know it, to feel its majesty, one should camp in the bottom and watch the sunset and the moonrise while the river marches from its lair like an angry lion."

Robert Brewster Stanton, a civil engineer whose original work has brought him prominently before the scientific world, followed Major Powell's explorations, twenty years later, with a surveying company of his own organization,—and Mr. Stanton is, indeed, the only explorer who has made the continuous journey the entire length of the Colorado River which Major Powell navigated for a thousand miles. It was in May of 1889 that Mr. Stanton and his men initiated this daring feat, and of one phase of the appearance of the caÑon Mr. Stanton's glowing, eloquent pen recorded:

"Those terrifying, frowning walls are moving, are changing! A new light is not only creeping over them, but is coming out from their very shadows. See those flattened slopes above the dark sandstone on top the granite; even at this very moment they are being colored in gorgeous stripes of horizontal layers of yellow, brown, white, green, and purple."What means this wondrous change? Wherein lies this secret of the great caÑon?

"After living in it and with it for so many weeks and months, I lost all thought of the great chasm as being only a huge rock mass, carved into its many intricate forms by ages of erosion. It became to me what it has ever since remained, and what it really is,—a living, moving, sentient being!

"The Grand CaÑon is not a solitude. It is a living, moving, pulsating being, ever changing in form and color, pinnacles and towers springing into being out of unseen depths. From dark shades of brown and black, scarlet flames suddenly flash out and then die away into stretches of orange and purple. How can such a shifting, animated glory be called 'a thing'? It is a being, and among its upper battlements, its temples, its amphitheatres, its cathedral spires, its monuments and its domes, and in the deeper recesses of its inner gorge its spirit, its soul, the very spirit of the living God himself, lives and moves and has its being."

Mr. C. M. Skinner, of the "Brooklyn Eagle," impressively wrote:

"... After the sky colors, too, have faded, you are about to turn away, lingering, regretting, when—again, a wonder; for new colors, deep, tender, solemn, flow up along the painted walls, as night brims out of the deep. The bottom grows vague and misty, but each Walhalla is steeped in purple as soft as the bloom of grapes. When day is wholly gone and the caÑon has become to the eye a mere feeling or impression of depth and space, walk out on some lonely point. The slopes, thirteen miles away, are visible as gray walls, distinct from the black cliffs, and on the hither side the trees are clear against the snow. No night is absolute in blackness, but as we look it seems as though the caÑon was lighted from within. It is an abyss of shadow and mystery. There is a sadness in the caÑon, as in all great things of nature, that removes it from human experience. We have seen the utmost of the world's sublimity, and life is fuller from that hour."

All these and many other transcriptions of its glory form a picture gallery which each lover of the Grand CaÑon prizes as among his choicest possessions. Thomas Moran, the artist, has painted many scenes from the caÑon, one of these paintings having been placed in the Capitol in Washington, where it is the object of the admiration and the wonder of the endless procession of visitors who throng the nation's centre. Painter and poet and prophet make their pilgrimages to this one stupendous Marvel of Nature. To the prophets and the poets of every century and every age it flashes its responsive message; and the worshipper at the shrine of this Infinite Beauty, this sublimest Majesty, can but feel, with Mr. Higgins,—that poetic lover of the vast Southwest, the lover of music and literature and art and nature, whose beautiful life on earth closed in 1900, but whose charm of presence still pervades the scenes he loved and memorialized,—with this lofty and poetic recorder of nature one can but say of the Grand CaÑon: "Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven."

In retrospective glance over a very midsummer night's dream of the ineffable glory and beauty of wanderings from Pike's Peak to the Pacific there stands out to the mental vision one treasured possession whose loveliness exceeds that of all scenic landscape; which is more luminous and crystal clear than the luminous atmosphere of beautiful Colorado or glowing Arizona; which is more enduring in its changelessness than even the Petrified Forests or the mighty precipices of the Grand CaÑon; which is invested with all the etherial splendor of that brilliant young city which the Spanish conquerors knew as Pueblo de la Reine de los Angeles: which is as sacred in its nature as are the sacred legends of the Holy Faith of St. Francis. This treasured possession is that of the friendships formed during this enchanted journey; of the generous kindness, the bountiful hospitality; the exquisite courtesy and grace constantly received from each and all with an unfailing uniformity, including those in widely varying relations and pursuits; those who, according to outer standards, are the more, or the less, fortunate in power, resources, or development,—the treasured possession of all this sweet and gracious friendliness is imperishable; and in this priceless and precious gift, which is not only a treasure for the life that now is, but also for the life which is to come, is there crystallized all the charm of summer wanderings in the Land of Enchantment.