doughnuts are dornicks and the
pickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed to
be there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a couple
of hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. It reminds him of
them because it is so different. Between Kansas City and the Coast there
are a dozen or more of these hotels scattered along the line.

And so, with real food to stay you and one of Tuskegee's bright,
straw-colored graduates to minister to your wants in the sleeper, you
come on the morning of the third day to the Grand Canon in northern
Arizona; you take one look--and instantly you lose all your former
standards of comparison. You stand there gazing down the raw, red gullet
of that great gosh-awful gorge, and you feel your self-importance
shriveling up to nothing inside of you. You haven't an adjective left to
your back. It makes you realize what the sensations would be of one
little microbe lost inside of Barnum's fat lady.

I think my preconceived conception of the Canon was the same conception
most people have before they come to see it for themselves--a straight
up-and-down slit in the earth, fabulously steep and fabulously deep;
nevertheless merely a slit. It is no such thing.

Imagine, if you can, a monster of a hollow approximately some hundreds
of miles long and a mile deep, and anywhere from ten to sixteen miles
wide, with a mountain range--the most wonderful mountain range in the
world--planted in it; so that, viewing the spectacle from above, you get
the illusion of being in a stationary airship, anchored up among the
clouds; imagine these mountain peaks--hundreds upon hundreds of
them--rising one behind the other, stretching away in endless, serried
rank until the eye swims and the mind staggers at the task of trying to
count them; imagine them splashed and splattered over with all the
earthly colors you ever saw and a lot of unearthly colors you never saw
before; imagine them carved and fretted and scrolled into all
shapes--tabernacles, pyramids, battleships, obelisks, Moorish
palaces--the Moorish suggestion is especially pronounced both in
colorings and in shapes--monuments, minarets, temples, turrets, castles,
spires, domes, tents, tepees, wigwams, shafts.

Imagine other ravines opening from the main one, all nuzzling their
mouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundreds
of these lesser canyons, and any one of them would be a marvel were