ableland, and
beyond it was another higher slope, up which the same trail ran. The
trees were growing smaller and the sky flowed broad and blue above their
tops. The ground was only rock, with a thin veneer of soil here and
there. Gnarled, stunted cedars and gray, twisted cypress clung for a
roothold to these barren ledges. The morning breeze swept, sharp and
invigorating, out of a broad open space beyond the edge of this rocky
woodland height. Eloise and I pushed on a little farther, leaving the
others still on the narrow shelf above our camping-place.

Suddenly, as we rode out of the closer timber to where the scattered
growths were hardly higher than our heads, the first heaven and the
first earth seemed to pass away--not in irreverence I write it--and we
stood face to face with a new heaven and a new earth--where, in the
Grand Canon of the Colorado River, the sublimity of the Almighty
Builder's beauty and omnipotence was voiced in one stupendous Word,
wrought in enduring color in everlasting stone. Cleaving its way
westward to some far-off sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from
lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth. We stood upon
the rim of it--a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid
limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped
again through furlongs of black gneiss, red sandstone, and gray granite.

Beyond this mighty chasm great forest trees were, to our eyes, only as
weeds along its rim. Between that rim and ours we could look down upon
high mountain buttes and sloping red tablelands, and dizzy gorges with
pinnacled walls and towers and domes--vast forms no pen will ever
picture--not hurled in wild confusion by titan fury, but symmetrical and
purposeful and calm.

Through slowly crawling millions of patiently wearing years, while stars
grew old and perished from the firmament, with cloud, and frost, and
wind, and water, and sharp cutting sands, these strata of the old
earth's crust were chiseled into gigantic outlines, and all the
worn-down, crumbled atoms of debris were swept through long, tortuous
leagues of distance toward the sea by a mad river swirling through the
lowest depths. A mile straight down, as the crow never flies here, it
rushes, but to us the river was a mere creek, seen only where the lower
gorges open to the channel.

In the early light of that October morning the weird, vast shapes that
filled, the abyss were bathed in a bewilderin