he little
steep, stony slope--300 yards--and we should see! Our party were
straggling up the hill: two or three had reached the edge. I looked up.
The duchess threw up her arms and screamed. We were not fifteen paces
behind, but we saw nothing. We took the few steps, and the whole
magnificence broke upon us. No one could be prepared for it. The scene
is one to strike dumb with awe, or to unstring the nerves; one might
stand in silent astonishment, another would burst into tears.

There are some experiences that cannot be repeated--one's first view of
Rome, one's first view of Jerusalem. But these emotions are produced by
association, by the sudden standing face to face with the scenes most
wrought into our whole life and education by tradition and religion.
This was without association, as it was without parallel. It was a shock
so novel that the mind, dazed, quite failed to comprehend it. All that
we could grasp was a vast confusion of amphitheatres and strange
architectural forms resplendent with color. The vastness of the view
amazed us quite as much as its transcendent beauty.

[Illustration: GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO--VIEW FROM THE HANSE TRAIL.]

We had expected a canon--two lines of perpendicular walls 6000 feet
high, with the ribbon of a river at the bottom; but the reader may
dismiss all his notions of a canon, indeed of any sort of mountain or
gorge scenery with which he is familiar. We had come into a new world.
What we saw was not a canon, or a chasm, or a gorge, but a vast area
which is a break in the plateau. From where we stood it was twelve miles
across to the opposite walls--a level line of mesa on the Utah side. We
looked up and down for twenty to thirty miles. This great space is
filled with gigantic architectural constructions, with amphitheatres,
gorges, precipices, walls of masonry, fortresses terraced up to the
level of the eye, temples mountain size, all brilliant with horizontal
lines of color--streaks of solid hues a few feet in width, streaks a
thousand feet in width--yellows, mingled white and gray, orange, dull
red, brown, blue, carmine, green, all blending in the sunlight into one
transcendent suffusion of splendor. Afar off we saw the river in two
places, a mere thread, as motionless and smooth as a strip of mirror,
only we knew it was a turbid, boiling torrent, 6000 feet below us.
Directly opposite the overhanging ledge on which we stood was a
mountain, the sloping base of which was as