TIME AND CHANGE 



grand and austere. But I do not think one could 

 ever feel at home in or near the Grand Canon; it is 

 too unlike anything we have ever known upon the 

 earth; it is like a vision of some strange colossal 

 city uncovered from the depth of geologic time. You 

 may have come to it, as we did, from the Petrified 

 Forests, where you saw the silicified trunks of thou- 

 sands of gigantic trees or tree ferns, that grew mil- 

 lions of years ago, most of them uncovered, but 

 many of them protruding from banks of clay and 

 gravel, and in their interiors rich in all the colors of 

 the rainbow, and you wonder if you may not now 

 be gazing upon some petrified antediluvian city of 

 temples and holy places exhumed by mysterious 

 hands and opened up to the vulgar gaze of to-day. 

 You look into it from above and from another world 

 and you descend into it at your peril. Yosemite you 

 enter as into a gigantic hall and make your own; the 

 canon you gaze down upon, and are an alien, whether 

 you enter it or not. Yosemite is carved out of the 

 most majestic and enduring of all rocks, granite; the 

 Grand Canon is carved out of one of the most beau- 

 tiful, but perishable, red Carboniferous sandstone 

 and limestone. There is a maze of beautiful and in- 

 tricate lines in the latter, a wilderness of temple-like 

 forms and monumental remains, and noble archi- 

 tectural profiles that delight while they bewilder the 

 eye. Yosemite has much greater simplicity, and is 

 much nearer the classic standard of beauty. Its 



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