One Need Not Go Hunting The So-Called "Points Of
Interest." The Verge Anywhere, Everywhere, Is A Point Of Interest
Beyond One's Wildest Dreams.
As yet, few of the promontories or throng of mountain buildings in the
canyon are named.
Nor among such exuberance of forms are names
thought of by the bewildered, hurried tourist. He would be as likely
to think of names for waves in a storm. The Eastern and Western
Cloisters, Hindu Amphitheater, Cape Royal, Powell's Plateau, Grand
View Point, Point Sublime, Bissell and Moran Points, the Temple of
Set, Vishnu's Temple, Shiva's Temple, Twin Temples, Tower of Babel,
Hance's Column - these fairly good names given by Dutton, Holmes,
Moran, and others are scattered over a large stretch of the canyon
wilderness.
All the canyon rock-beds are lavishly painted, except a few neutral
bars and the granite notch at the bottom occupied by the river, which
makes but little sign. It is a vast wilderness of rocks in a sea of
light, colored and glowing like oak and maple woods in autumn, when
the sun-gold is richest. I have just said that it is impossible to
learn what the canyon is like from descriptions and pictures.
Powell's and Dutton's descriptions present magnificent views not only
of the canyon but of all the grand region round about it; and Holmes's
drawings, accompanying Dutton's report, are wonderfully good. Surely
faithful and loving skill can go no farther in putting the
multitudinous decorated forms on paper. But the COLORS, the living
rejoicing COLORS, chanting morning and evening in chorus to heaven!
Whose brush or pencil, however lovingly inspired, can give us these?
And if paint is of no effect, what hope lies in pen-work? Only this:
some may be incited by it to go and see for themselves.
No other range of mountainous rock-work of anything like the same
extent have I seen that is so strangely, boldly, lavishly colored.
The famous Yellowstone Canyon below the falls comes to mind; but,
wonderful as it is, and well deserved as is its fame, compared with
this it is only a bright rainbow ribbon at the roots of the pines.
Each of the series of level, continuous beds of carboniferous rocks of
the canyon has, as we have seen, its own characteristic color. The
summit limestone beds are pale yellow; next below these are the
beautiful rose-colored cross-bedded sandstones; next there are a
thousand feet of brilliant red sandstones; and below these the red
wall limestones, over two thousand feet thick, rich massy red, the
greatest and most influential of the series, and forming the main
color-fountain. Between these are many neutral-tinted beds. The
prevailing colors are wonderfully deep and clear, changing and
blending with varying intensity from hour to hour, day to day, season
to season; throbbing, wavering, glowing, responding to every passing
cloud or storm, a world of color in itself, now burning in separate
rainbow bars streaked and blotched with shade, now glowing in one
smooth, all-pervading ethereal radiance like the alpenglow, uniting
the rocky world with the heavens.
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