John L. Stoddard's Lectures Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FIRST VIEW.]

Early the next morning I eagerly climbed the little knoll at the foot of which our tents were located, for I well knew that from its summit I should see the Canon. Many grand objects in the world are heralded by sound: the solemn music of Niagara, the roar of active geysers in the Yellowstone, the intermittent thunder of the sea upon a rocky coast, are all distinguishable at some distance; but over the Grand Canon of the Colorado broods a solemn silence. No warning voice proclaims its close proximity; no partial view prepares us for its awful presence. We walk a few steps through the pine trees from the camp and suddenly find ourselves upon the Canon's edge. Just before reaching it, I halted for a moment, as has always been my wont when approaching for the first time any natural or historic object that I have longed for years to look upon. Around me rose the stately pines; behind me was a simple stretch of rolling woodland; nothing betrayed the nearness of one of the greatest wonders of the world. Could it be possible that I was to be disappointed? At last I hurried through the intervening s.p.a.ce, gave a quick look, and almost reeled.

The globe itself seemed to have suddenly yawned asunder, leaving me trembling on the hither brink of two dissevered hemispheres. Vast as the bed of a vanished ocean, deep as Mount Was.h.i.+ngton, riven from its apex to its base, the grandest canon on our planet lay glittering below me in the sunlight like a submerged continent, drowned by an ocean that had ebbed away. At my very feet, so near that I could have leaped at once into eternity, the earth was cleft to a depth of six thousand six hundred feet--not by a narrow gorge, like other canons, but by an awful gulf within whose cavernous immensity the forests of the Adirondacks would appear like jackstraws, the Hudson Palisades would be an insignificant stratum, Niagara would be indiscernible, and cities could be tossed like pebbles.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE EARTH-GULF OF ARIZONA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A PORTION OF THE GULF.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: "A VAST, INCOMPARABLE VOID."]

As brain grew steadier and vision clearer, I saw, directly opposite, the other side of the Canon thirteen miles away. It was a mountain wall, a mile in height, extending to the right and left as far as the eye could reach; and since the cliff upon which I was standing was its counterpart, it seemed to me as if these parallel banks were once the sh.o.r.e-lines of a vanished sea. Between them lay a vast, incomparable void, two hundred miles in length, presenting an unbroken panorama to the east and west until the gaze could follow it no farther. Try to conceive what these dimensions mean by realizing that a strip of the State of Ma.s.sachusetts, thirteen miles in width, and reaching from Boston to Albany, could be laid as a covering over this Canon, from one end to the other; and that if the entire range of the White Mountains were flung into it, the monstrous pit would still remain comparatively empty! Even now it is by no means without contents; for, as I gazed with awe and wonder into its colossal area, I seemed to be looking down upon a colored relief-map of the mountain systems of the continent. It is not strictly one canon, but a labyrinth of canons, in many of which the whole Yosemite could be packed away and lost. Thus one of them, the Marble Canon, is of itself more than three thousand feet deep and sixty-six miles long.

In every direction I beheld below me a tangled skein of mountain ranges, thousands of feet in height, which the Grand Canon's walls enclosed, as if it were a huge sarcophagus, holding the skeleton of an infant world. It is evident, therefore, that all the other canons of our globe are, in comparison with this, what pygmies are to a giant, and that the name Grand Canon, which is often used to designate some relatively insignificant ravine, should be in truth applied only to the stupendous earth-gulf of Arizona.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A SECTION OF THE LABYRINTH.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MOUNT AYER.]

At length, I began to try to separate and identify some of these formations. Directly in the foreground, a savage looking mountain reared its splintered head from the abyss, and stood defiantly confronting me, six thousand feet above the Canon's floor. Though practically inaccessible to the average tourist, this has been climbed, and is named Mount Ayer, after Mrs. Edward Ayer, the first woman who ever descended into the Canon to the river's edge. Beyond this, other mountains rise from the gulf, many of which resemble the Step Pyramid at Sakhara, one of the oldest of the royal sepulchres beside the Nile. But so immeasurably vaster are the pyramids of this Canon than any work of man, that had the tombs of the Pharaohs been placed beside them, I could not have discovered them without a field-gla.s.s. Some of these grand constructions stand alone, while others are in pairs; and many of them resemble Oriental temples, b.u.t.tressed with terraces a mile or two in length, and approached by steps a hundred feet in height. Around these, too, are many smaller mountainous formations, crude and unfinished in appearance, like shrines commenced and then abandoned by the Canon's Architect. Most of us are but children of a larger growth, and love to interpret Nature, as if she reared her mountains, painted her sunsets, cut her canons, and poured forth her cataracts solely for our instruction and enjoyment. So, when we gaze on forms like these, shaped like gigantic temples, obelisks, and altars fas.h.i.+oned by man's hands, we try to see behind them something personal, and even name them after Hindu, Grecian, and Egyptian G.o.ds, as if those deities made them their abodes. Thus, one of these shrines was called by the artist, Thomas Moran, the Temple of Set; three others are dedicated respectively to Siva, Vishnu, and Vulcan; while on the apex of a mighty altar, still unnamed, a twisted rock-formation, several hundred feet in height, suggests a flame, eternally preserved by unseen hands, ascending to an unknown G.o.d.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SOME OF THE CAnON TEMPLES.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SIVA'S TEMPLE.]

It is difficult to realize the magnitude of these objects, so deceptive are distances and dimensions in the transparent atmosphere of Arizona. Siva's Temple, for example, stands upon a platform four or five miles square, from which rise domes and pinnacles a thousand feet in height. Some of their summits call to mind immense sarcophagi of jasper or of porphyry, as if they were the burial-places of dead deities, and the Grand Canon a Necropolis for pagan G.o.ds. Yet, though the greater part of the population of the world could be a.s.sembled here, one sees no wors.h.i.+pers, save an occasional devotee of Nature, standing on the Canon's rim, lost in astonishment and hushed in awe.

These temples were, however, never intended for a human priesthood. A man beside them is a pygmy. His voice here would be little more effective than the chirping of an insect. The G.o.d-appointed celebrant, in the cathedrals of this Canon, must be Nature. Her voice alone can rouse the echoes of these mountains into deafening peals of thunder. Her metaphors are drawn from an experience of ages. Her prayers are silent, rapturous communings with the Infinite. Her hymns of praise are the glad songs of birds; her requiems are the meanings of the pines; her symphonies the solemn roaring of the winds.

"Sermons in stone" abound at every turn; and if, as the poet has affirmed, "An undevout astronomer is mad," with still more truth can it be said that those are blind who in this wonderful environment look not "through Nature up to Nature's G.o.d." These wrecks of Tempest and of Time are finger-posts that point the thoughts of mortals to eternal heights; and we find cause for hope in the fact that, even in a place like this, Man is superior to Nature; for he interprets it, he finds in it the thoughts of G.o.d, and reads them after Him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEAR THE TEMPLE OF SET.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HANCE'S TRAIL, LOOKING UP.]

The coloring of the Grand Canon is no less extraordinary than its forms. Nature has saved this chasm from being a terrific scene of desolation by glorifying all that it contains. Wall after wall, turret after turret, and mountain range after mountain range belted with tinted strata, succeed one another here like billows petrified in glowing colors. These hues are not as brilliant and astonis.h.i.+ng in their variety as are the colors of the Yellowstone Canon, but their subdued and sombre tones are perfectly suited to the awe-inspiring place which they adorn. The prominent tints are yellow, red, maroon, and a dull purple, as if the glory of unnumbered sunsets, fading from these rugged cliffs, had been in part imprisoned here. Yet, somehow, specimens of these colored rocks lose all their brilliancy and beauty when removed from their environment, like sea-sh.e.l.ls from the beach; a verification of the sentiment so beautifully expressed in the lines of Emerson:

"I wiped away the weeds and foam, I fetched my sea-born treasures home; But the poor, unsightly, noisome things Had left their beauty on the sh.o.r.e, With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar."

[Ill.u.s.tration: MIST IN THE CAnON.]

To stand upon the edge of this stupendous gorge, as it receives its earliest greeting from the G.o.d of day, is to enjoy in a moment compensation for long years of ordinary uneventful life. When I beheld the scene, a little before daybreak, a lake of soft, white clouds was floating round the summits of the Canon mountains, hiding the huge creva.s.se beneath, as a light coverlet of snow conceals a chasm in an Alpine glacier. I looked with awe upon this misty curtain of the morn, for it appeared to me symbolic of the grander curtain of the past which shuts out from our view the awful struggles of the elements enacted here when the grand gulf was being formed. At length, however, as the light increased, this thin, diaphanous covering was mysteriously withdrawn, and when the sun's disk rose above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched on the opposite sides of the ravines, in dark blue silhouettes, the evanescent forms of castles, battlements, and turrets from which some shreds of white mist waved like banners of capitulation; stupendous moats beneath them were still black with shadow; while clouds filled many of the minor canons, like vapors rising from enormous cauldrons. Gradually, as the solar couriers forced a pa.s.sage into the narrow gullies, and drove the remnant of night's army from its hiding-places, innumerable shades of purple, yellow, red, and brown appeared, varying according to the composition of the mountains, and the enormous void was gradually filled to the brim with a luminous haze, which one could fancy was the smoke of incense from its countless altars. A similar, and even more impressive, scene is visible here in the late afternoon, when all the western battlements in their turn grow resplendent, while the eastern walls submit to an eclipse; till, finally, a gray pall drops upon the lingering bloom of day, the pageant fades, the huge sarcophagi are mantled in their shrouds, the gorgeous colors which have blazed so sumptuously through the day grow pale and vanish, the altar fires turn to ashes, the mighty temples draw their veils and seem deserted by both G.o.ds and men, and the stupendous panorama awaits, beneath the canopy of night, the glory of another dawn.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A STUPENDOUS PANORAMA.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A TANGLED SKEIN OF CAnONS.]

It was my memorable privilege to see, one afternoon, a thunder storm below me here. A monstrous cloud-wall, like a huge gray veil, came traveling up the Canon, and we could watch the lightning strike the b.u.t.tes and domes ten or twelve miles away, while the loud peals of thunder, broken by crags and multiplied by echoes, rolled toward us through the darkening gulf at steadily decreasing intervals.

Sometimes two flashes at a time ran quivering through the air and launched their bolts upon the mountain shrines, as though their altars, having been erected for idolatrous wors.h.i.+p, were doomed to be annihilated. Occasionally, through an opening in the clouds, the sun would suddenly light up the summit of a mountain, or flash a path of gold through a ravine; and I shall never forget the curious sensation of seeing far beneath me bright suns.h.i.+ne in one canon and a violent storm in another. At last, a rainbow cast its radiant bridge across the entire s.p.a.ce, and we beheld the tempest disappear like a troop of cavalry in a cloud of dust beneath that iridescent arch, beyond whose curving spectrum all the temples stood forth, still intact in their sublimity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON THE BRINK.]

At certain points along the Canon, promontories jut out into the abyss, like headlands which in former times projected into an ocean that has disappeared. Hence, riding along the brink, as one may do for miles, we looked repeatedly into many lateral fissures, from fifteen hundred to three thousand feet in depth. All these, however, like gigantic fingers, pointed downward to the centre of the Canon, where, five miles away, and at a level more than six thousand feet below the brink on which we stood, extended a long, glittering trail.

This, where the sunlight struck it, gleamed like an outstretched band of gold. It was the sinuous Colorado, yellow as the Tiber.

[Ill.u.s.tration: RIPLEY'S b.u.t.tE.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A BIT OF THE RIVER.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ON HANCE'S TRAIL.]

One day of our stay here was devoted to making the descent to this river. It is an undertaking compared with which the crossing of the Gemmi on a mule is child's play. Fortunately, however, the arduous trip is not absolutely necessary for an appreciation of the immensity and grandeur of the scenery. On the contrary, one gains a really better idea of these by riding along the brink, and looking down at various points on the sublime expanse. Nevertheless, a descent into the Canon is essential for a proper estimate of its details, and one can never realize the enormity of certain cliffs and the extent of certain valleys, till he has crawled like a maimed insect at their base and looked thence upward to the narrowed sky. Yet such an investigation of the Canon is, after all, merely like going down from a balloon into a great city to examine one of its myriad streets, since any gorge we may select for our descending path is but a tiny section of a labyrinth. That which is unique and incomparable here is the view from the brink; and when the promised hotel is built upon the border of the Canon, visitors will be content to remain for days at their windows or on the piazzas, feasting their souls upon a scene always sublime and sometimes terrible.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A VISION OF SUBLIMITY.]

Nevertheless, desirous of exploring a specimen of these chasms (as we often select for minute examination a single painting out of an entire picture gallery) we made the descent to the Colorado by means of a crooked scratch upon a mountain side, which one might fancy had been blazed by a zigzag flash of lightning. As it requires four hours to wriggle down this path, and an equal amount of time to wriggle up, I spent the greater part of a day on what a comrade humorously styled the "quarter-deck of a mule." A square, legitimate seat in the saddle was usually impossible, so steep was the incline; and hence, when going down, I braced my feet and lay back on the haunches of the beast, and, in coming up, had to lean forward and clutch the pommel, to keep from sliding off, as a human avalanche, on the head of the next in line. In many places, however, riding was impossible, and we were compelled to scramble over the rocks on foot. The effect of hours of this exercise on muscles unaccustomed to such surprises may be imagined; yet, owing to the wonderfully restorative air of Arizona, the next day after this, the severest physical exertion I had ever known, I did not feel the slightest bad result, and was as fresh as ever. That there is an element of danger in this trip cannot be doubted. At times the little trail, on which two mules could not possibly have pa.s.sed each other, skirts a precipice where the least misstep would hurl the traveler to destruction; and every turn of the zigzag path is so sharp that first the head and then the tail of the mule inevitably projects above the abyss, and wig-wags to the mule below. Moreover, though not a vestige of a parapet consoles the dizzy rider, in several places the animal simply puts its feet together and toboggans down the smooth face of a slanting rock, bringing up at the bottom with a jerk that makes the tourist see a large variety of constellations, and even causes his beast to belch forth an involuntary roar of disenchantment, or else to try to pulverize his immediate successor. In such a place as this Nature seems pitiless and cruel; and one is impressed with the reflection that a million lives might be crushed out in any section of this maze of gorges and not a feature of it would be changed. There is, however, a fascination in gambling with danger, when a desirable prize is to be gained. The stake we risk may be our lives, yet, when the chances are in our favor, we often love to match excitement against the possibility of death; and even at the end, when we are safe, a sigh sometimes escapes us, as when the curtain falls on an absorbing play.

[Ill.u.s.tration: STARTING DOWN THE TRAIL.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A YAWNING CHASM.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: OBLIGED TO WALK.]

As we descended, it grew warmer, not only from the greater elevation of the sun at noon, but from the fact that in this sudden drop of six thousand feet we had pa.s.sed through several zones of temperature.

Snow, for example, may be covering the summits of the mountains in midwinter, while at the bottom of the Canon are summer warmth and vernal flowers. When, after two or three hours of continuous descent, we looked back at our starting-point, it seemed incredible that we had ever stood upon the pinnacles that towered so far above us, and were apparently piercing the slowly moving clouds. The effect was that of looking up from the bottom of a gigantic well. Instinctively I asked myself if I should ever return to that distant upper world, and it gave me a memorable realization of my individual insignificance to stand in such a sunken solitude, and realize that the fissure I was exploring was only a single loop in a vast network of ravines, which, if extended in a straight line, would make a canon seven hundred miles in length. It was with relief that we reached, at last, the terminus of the lateral ravine we had been following and at the very bottom of the Canon rested on the bank of the Colorado. The river is a little freer here than elsewhere in its tortuous course, and for some hundred feet is less compressed by the grim granite cliffs which, usually, rise in smooth black walls hundreds of feet in almost vertical height, and for two hundred miles retain in their embrace the restless, foaming flood that has no other avenue of escape.

The navigation of this river by Major J.W. Powell, in 1869, was one of the most daring deeds of exploration ever achieved by man, and the thrilling story of his journey down the Colorado, for more than a thousand miles, and through the entire length of the Grand Canon, is as exciting as the most sensational romance. Despite the remonstrances of friends and the warnings of friendly Indians, Major Powell, with a flotilla of four boats and nine men, started down the river, on May 24th, from Green River City, in Utah, and, on the 30th of August, had completed his stupendous task, with the loss of two boats and four men. Of the latter, one had deserted at an early date and escaped; but the remaining three, unwilling to brave any longer the terrors of the unknown Canon, abandoned the expedition and tried to return through the desert, but were ma.s.sacred by Indians. It is only when one stands beside a portion of this lonely river, and sees it shooting stealthily and swiftly from a rift in the t.i.tanic cliffs and disappearing mysteriously between dark gates of granite, that he realizes what a heroic exploit the first navigation of this river was; for nothing had been known of its imprisoned course through this entanglement of chasms, or could be known, save by exploring it in boats, so difficult of access were, and are, the two or three points where it is possible for a human being to reach its perpendicular banks. Accordingly, when the valiant navigators sailed into these mysterious waters, they knew that there was almost every chance against the possibility of a boat's living in such a seething current, which is, at intervals, punctured with a mult.i.tude of tusk-like rocks, tortured into rapids, twisted into whirlpools, or broken by falls; while in the event of s.h.i.+pwreck they could hope for little save naked precipices to cling to for support. Moreover, after a heavy rain the Colorado often rises here fifty or sixty feet under the veritable cataracts of water which, for miles, stream directly down the perpendicular walls, and make of it a maddened torrent wilder than the rapids of Niagara. All honor, then, to Powell and his comrades who braved not alone the actual dangers thus described, but stood continually alert for unknown perils, which any bend in the swift, snake-like river might disclose, and which would make the gloomy groove through which they slipped a black-walled _oubliette_, or gate to Acheron.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CABIN ON THE TRAIL.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A HALT.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: AT THE BOTTOM.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TAKING LUNCH NEAR THE RIVER.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BESIDE THE COLORADO.]

If any river in the world should be regarded with superst.i.tious reverence, it is the Colorado, for it represents to us, albeit in a diminished form, the element that has produced the miracle of the Arizona Canon,--water. Far back in the distant Eocene Epoch of our planet's history, the Colorado was the outlet of an inland sea which drained off toward the Pacific, as the country of northwestern Arizona rose; and the Grand Canon ill.u.s.trates, on a stupendous scale, the system of erosion which, in a lesser degree, has deeply furrowed the entire region. At first one likes to think of the excavation of this awful chasm as the result of some tremendous cataclysm of Nature; but, in reality, it has all been done by water, a.s.sisted, no doubt, by the subtler action of the winds and storms in the disintegration of the monster cliffs, which, as they slowly crumbled into dust, were carried downward by the rains, and, finally, were borne off by the omnivorous river to the sea.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MONSTER CLIFFS, AND A NOTCH IN THE CAnON WALL.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MILES OF INTRA-CAnONS.]

But though, at first, these agents do not seem as forceful and extraordinary as a single terrible catastrophe, the slow results thus gained are even more impressive. For what an appalling lapse of time must have been necessary to cut down and remove layers of sandstone, marble, and granite, thousands of feet in thickness; to carve the mighty shrines of Siva and of Vishnu, and to etch out these scores of interlacing canons! To calculate it one must reckon a century for every turn of the hourgla.s.s. It is the story of a struggle maintained for ages between the solid and the fluid elements, in which at last the yielding water won a victory over adamant. It is an evidence, too, of Nature's patient methods; a triumph of the delicate over the strong, the liquid over the solid, the transitory over the enduring.

At present, the softer material has been exhausted, and the rapacious river, shrunken in size, must satisfy itself by gnawing only the archaic granite which still curbs its course. Yet if this calculation overpowers us, what shall we say of the reflections awakened by the fact that all the limestone cliffs along the lofty edges of the Canon are composed of fossils,--the skeletons of creatures that once lived here covered by an ocean, and that ten thousand feet of strata, which formerly towered above the present summits of the Canon walls, have been eroded and swept downward to the sea! Hence, were the missing strata (all of which are found in regular sequence in the high plateaus of Utah) restored, this Canon would be sixteen thousand feet in depth, and from its borders one could look down upon a mountain higher than Mont Blanc! To calculate the aeons implied in the repeated elevations and subsidences which made this region what it is would be almost to comprehend eternity.

In such a retrospect centuries crumble and disappear into the gulf of Time as pebbles into the Canon of the Colorado.

On my last evening in the pine tree camp I left my tent and walked alone to the edge of the Grand Canon. The night was white with the splendor of the moon. A s.h.i.+mmering lake of silvery vapor rolled its noiseless tide against the mountains, and laved the terraces of the Hindu shrines. The lunar radiance, falling into such profundity, was powerless to reveal the plexus of subordinate canons, and even the temples glimmered through the upper air like wraiths of the huge forms which they reveal by day. Advancing cautiously to an isolated point upon the brink, I lay upon my face, and peered down into the spectral void. No voice of man, nor cry of bird, nor roar of beast resounded through those awful corridors of silence. Even thought had no existence in that sunken realm of chaos. I felt as if I were the sole survivor of the deluge. Only the melancholy murmur of the wind ascended from that sepulchre of centuries. It seemed the requiem for a vanished world.

[Ill.u.s.tration]