TIME AND CHANGE 
We call it the “Divine Abyss.” It seems as much 
of heaven as of earth. Of the many descriptions of 
it, none seems adequate. To rave over it, or to pour 
into it a torrent of superlatives, is of little avail. My 
companion came nearer the mark when she quietly 
repeated from Revelation, “And he carried me away 
in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and 
shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem.” It 
does, indeed, suggest a far-off, half-sacred antiquity, 
some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or India. 
We speak of it as a scene: it is more like a vision, 
so foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, 
and so surpassingly beautiful. 
To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, 
so unlike everything one’s experience has yielded, 
and so unlike the results of the usual haphazard 
working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not 
wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked 
me what I supposed did all this. I could even sym- 
pathize with the remark of an old woman visitor 
who is reported to have said that she thought they 
had built the cafion too near the hotel. The enorm- 
ous cleavage which the cafion shows, the abrupt 
drop from the brink of thousands of feet, the sheer 
faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at 
first the impression that it is all the work of some 
titanic quarryman, who must have removed cubic 
miles of strata as we remove cubic yards of earth. 
Go out to Hopi Point or O’Neil’s Point, and, as 
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