"It was like sudden death." yet she is
still alive. Again, after breakfast, she wrote: "My courage rose to meet
the greatness of the world." Then she "crawled half prostrate" to the
barest and highest rocks she could find on the rim, and confessed: "It
made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten
under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes here; in
these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits must range and
soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring." Yet here I have
heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse ravings of angry
men - none of them impressed as was the soul of the poet.
One money-making business man declared that he went to the rim at
night-time, and when he and his friends reached the spot they put forth
their hands and found - "an absolute end. We clutched vainly at black space.
To fathom this space we thrust over a big stone. No sound came back. The
pit was bottomless - the grave of the world. The mystery fascinated, the
void beckoned. We scarcely knew why we did not obey the summons - why we did
not abandon the present, and, by following the big stone, escape to the
future." And yet he had no urgent creditors bothering him. His financial
position was secure and unquestioned. His family relations were all that
could be desired. Wonderful, indeed, that a mere feature of natural scenery
could have led him to wonder why he didn't leave all the luxuries and
certainties of life, and leap into the unknown future! Yet that is just the
way the Canyon affected a sober business man of steady judgment.
A well-known writer declares: "It is a paradox of chaos and repose, of
gloom and radiance, of immeasurable desolation and enthralling beauty. It
is a despair and a joy; a woe and an ecstasy; a requiem and a hallelujah; a
world-ruin and a world-glory - everything in antithesis of such titanic
sort." I agree with him, and regard his expressions as indicative of my own
sensations.
Yet, when a reverend gentleman calls it a "delirium of nature," I cannot
agree with him. The delirium might be in his own mind, but there is no
delirium here. Neither does it seem to me that a certain university
president expresses things with any more wisdom or effectiveness, when he
says that it "impressed him with its infinite laziness." Lazy? When once,
in the far-distant past, after rising from the primeval sea, it sank back
again and deposited twelve thousand feet of strata, then lifted them out
into the sunshine, carved eleven thousand feet of them away, and sent them
dashing down the river to fill up the Gulf of California and make the
Mohave and Colorado Deserts?
