enthusiasts. Even its geographical location is the subject of widespread misapprehension.

Its title has been pirated for application to relatively insignificant canyons in distant parts of the country, and thousands of tourists have been led to believe that they saw the Grand Canyon, when, in fact, they looked upon a totally different scene, between which and the real Grand Canyon there is no more comparison “than there is between the Alleghanies or Trosachs and the Himalayas.”

There is but one Grand Canyon. Nowhere in the world has its like been found.

As Seen From the Rim

Stolid, indeed, is he who can front the awful scene and view its unearthly splendor of color and form without quaking knee or tremulous breath. An inferno, swathed in soft celestial fires; a whole chaotic under-world, just emptied of primeval floods and waiting for a new creative word; eluding all sense of perspective or dimension, outstretching the faculty of measurement, overlapping the confines of definite apprehension; a boding, terrible thing, unflinchingly real, yet spectral as a dream. The beholder is at first unimpressed by any detail; he is overwhelmed by the ensemble of a stupendous panorama, a thousand square miles in extent, that lies wholly beneath the eye, as if he stood upon a mountain peak instead of the level brink of a fearful chasm in the plateau, whose opposite shore is thirteen miles away. A labyrinth of huge architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, fretted with ornamental devices, festooned with lace-like webs formed of talus from the upper cliffs and painted with every color known to the palette in pure transparent tones of marvelous delicacy. Never was picture more harmonious, never flower more exquisitely beautiful. It flashes instant communication of all that architecture and painting and music for a thousand years have gropingly striven to express. It is the soul of Michael Angelo and of Beethoven.

Copyright, 1899, by H. G. Peabody. The River and the Canyon Wall.

A canyon, truly, but not after the accepted type. An intricate system of canyons, rather, each subordinate to the river channel in the midst, which in its turn is subordinate to the whole effect. That river channel, the profoundest depth, and actually more than 6,000 feet below the point of view, is in seeming a rather insignificant trench, attracting the eye more by reason of its somber tone and mysterious suggestion than by any appreciable characteristic of a chasm. It is perhaps five miles distant in a straight line, and its uppermost rims are nearly 4,000 feet beneath the observer, whose measuring capacity is entirely inadequate to the demand made by such magnitudes. One can not believe the distance to be more than a mile as the crow flies, before descending the wall or attempting some other form of actual measurement.

Mere brain knowledge counts for little against the illusion under which the organ of vision is here doomed to labor. Yonder cliff, darkening from white to gray, yellow, and brown as your glance descends, is taller than the Washington Monument. The Auditorium in Chicago would not cover one-half its perpendicular span. Yet it does not greatly impress you. You idly toss a pebble toward it, and are surprised to note how far the missile falls short. By and by you will learn that it is a good half mile distant, and when you go down the trail you will gain an abiding sense of its real proportions. Yet, relatively, it is an unimportant detail of the scene. Were Vulcan to cast it bodily into the chasm directly beneath your feet, it would pass for a bowlder, if, indeed, it were discoverable to the unaided eye.

Yet the immediate chasm itself is only the first step of a long terrace that leads down to the innermost gorge and the river. Roll a heavy stone to the rim and let it go. It falls sheer the height of a church or an Eiffel Tower, according to the point selected for such pastime, and explodes like a bomb on a projecting ledge. If, happily, any considerable fragments remain, they bound onward like elastic balls, leaping in wild parabola from point to point, snapping trees like straws; bursting, crashing, thundering down the declivities until they make a last plunge over the brink of a void; and then there comes languidly up the cliff sides a faint, distant roar, and your bowlder that had withstood the buffets of centuries lies scattered as wide as Wycliffe’s ashes, although the final fragment has lodged only a little way, so to speak, below the rim. Such performances are frequently given in these amphitheaters without human aid, by the mere undermining of the rain, or perhaps it is here that Sisyphus rehearses his unending task. Often in the silence of night some tremendous fragment has been heard crashing from terrace to terrace with shocks like thunder peal.

The spectacle is so symmetrical, and so completely excludes the outside world and its accustomed standards, it is with difficulty one can acquire any notion of its immensity. Were it half as deep, half as broad, it would be no less bewildering, so utterly does it baffle human grasp.

The Trip to the River

Only by descending into the canyon may one arrive at anything like comprehension of its proportions, and the descent can not be too urgently commended to every visitor who is sufficiently robust to bear a reasonable amount of fatigue. There are four paths down the southern wall of the canyon in the granite gorge district—Mystic Spring, Bright Angel, Berry’s and Hance’s trails. The following account of a descent of the old Hance trail will serve to indicate the nature of such an experience to-day, except that the trip may now be safely made with greater comfort.

For the first two miles it is a sort of Jacob’s ladder, zigzagging at an unrelenting pitch. At the end of two miles a comparatively gentle slope is reached, known as the blue limestone level, some 2,500 feet below the rim, that is to say—for such figures have to be impressed objectively upon the mind—five times the height of St. Peter’s, the Pyramid of Cheops, or the Strasburg Cathedral; eight times the height of the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty; eleven times the height of Bunker Hill Monument. Looking back from this level the huge picturesque towers that border the rim shrink to pigmies and seem to crown a perpendicular wall, unattainably far in the sky. Yet less than one-half the descent has been made.

Overshadowed by sandstone of chocolate hue the way grows gloomy and foreboding, and the gorge narrows. The traveler stops a moment beneath a slanting cliff 500 feet high, where there is an Indian grave and pottery scattered about. A gigantic niche has been worn in the face of this cavernous cliff, which, in recognition of its fancied Egyptian character, was named the Temple of Sett by the painter, Thomas Moran.

A little beyond this temple it becomes necessary to abandon the animals. The river is still a mile and a half distant. The way narrows now to a mere notch, where two wagons could barely pass, and the granite begins to tower gloomily overhead, for we have dropped below the sandstone and have entered the archæan—a frowning black rock, streaked, veined, and swirled with vivid red and white, smoothed and polished by the rivulet and beautiful as a mosaic. Obstacles are encountered in the form of steep, interposing crags, past which the brook has found a way, but over which the pedestrian must clamber. After these lesser difficulties come sheer descents, which at present are passed by the aid of ropes.

The last considerable drop is a 40-foot bit by the side of a pretty cascade, where there are just enough