depths of the Grand Canyon not only
the stupendous abyss whose terrible beauty grips the soul, but also
to-day's chapter in a thrilling story of creation whose beginning lay
untold centuries back in the ages, whose scene covers three hundred
thousand square miles of our wonderful southwest, whose actors include
the greatest forces of nature, whose tremendous episodes shame the
imagination of Dore, and whose logical end invites suggestions before
which finite minds shrink--this is to come into the presence of the
great spectacle properly equipped for its enjoyment. But how many who
see the Grand Canyon get more out of it than merely the beauty that
grips the soul?

So it is throughout the world of scenery. The geologic story written on
the cliffs of Crater Lake is more stupendous even than the glory of its
indigo bowl. The war of titanic forces described in simple language on
the rocks of Glacier National Park is unexcelled in sublimity in the
history of mankind. The story of Yellowstone's making multiplies many
times the thrill occasioned by its world-famed spectacle. Even the
simplest and smallest rock details often tell thrilling incidents of
prehistoric tunes out of which the enlightened imagination reconstructs
the romances and the tragedies of earth's earlier days.

How eloquent, for example, was the small, water-worn fragment of dull
coal we found on the limestone slope of one of Glacier's mountains!
Impossible companionship! The one the product of forest, the other of
submerged depths. Instantly I glimpsed the distant age when thousands of
feet above the very spot upon which I stood, but then at sea level,
bloomed a Cretaceous forest, whose broken trunks and matted foliage
decayed in bogs where they slowly turned to coal; coal which, exposed
and disintegrated during intervening ages, has long since--all but a
few small fragments like this--washed into the headwaters of the
Saskatchewan to merge eventually in the muds of Hudson Bay. And then,
still dreaming, my mind leaped millions of years still further back to
lake bottoms where, ten thousand feet below the spot on which I stood,
gathered the pre-Cambrian ooze which later hardened to this very
limestone. From ooze a score of thousand feet, a hundred million years,
to coal! And both lie here together now in my palm! Filled thus with
visions of a perspective beyond human comprehension, with what
multiplied intensity of interest I now returned to the noble view fr