36 OUR NATIONAL PARKS. 



" A pageant of ghastly desolation and yet of frightful vitality, such 

 as neither Dante nor Milton in their most sublime conceptions ever 

 even approached/' writes William. Winter. "Your heart is moved 

 with feeling that is far too deep for words." 



"It has a thousand differing moods," writes Hamlin Garland. 

 "No one can know it for what it is who has not lived with it every 

 day of the year. It is like a mountain range — a cloud today, a wall 

 of marble tomorrow. When the light falls into it, harsh, direct and 

 searching, it is great, but not beautiful. The lines are chaotic, dis- 

 turbing — but wait ! The clouds and the sunset, the moonrise and 

 the storm will transform it into a splendor no mountain range can 

 surpass. Peaks will shift and glow, walls darken, crags take fire, 

 and gray-green mesas, dimly seen, take on the gleam of opalescent 

 lakes of mountain water." 



"It seems a gigantic statement for even Nature to make all in 

 one mighty stone word," writes John Muir. "Wildness so Godful, 

 cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth's beauty and size. 

 * * * But the colors, the living, rejoicing colors, chanting, morn- 

 ing and evening, in chorus to heaven! Whose brush or pencil, how- 

 ever lovingly inspired, can give us these? In the supreme flaming 

 glory of sunset the whole canyon is transfigured, as if all the life and 

 light of centuries of sunshine stored up in the rocks was now being 

 poured forth as from one glorious fountain, flooding both earth and 

 sky." 



DIFFICULT TO COMPREHEND 



Even the most superficial description of this enormous spectacle 

 may not be put in words. The watcher upon the rim overlooks a 

 thousand square miles of pyramids and minarets carved from the 

 painted depths. Many miles away and more than a mile below the 

 level of his feet he sees a tiny silver thread which he knows is the 

 giant Colorado. He is numbed by the spectacle. At first he can- 

 not comprehend it. There is no measure, nothing which the eye can 

 grasp, the mind fathom. 



It may be hours before he can even slightly adjust himself to the 

 titanic spectacle, before it ceases to be utter chaos; and not until then 

 does he begin to exclaim in rapture. And he never wholly adjusts 

 himself, for with dawning appreciation comes growing wonder. Com- 

 prehension lies always just beyond his reach. But it will help to 

 descend one of these trails which zigzag down the precipitous cliffs 

 to the river's muddy edge. 



The Grand Canyon was first reported to the civilized world by the 

 early Spanish explorers in 1540. It was first described in 1851 by 

 the Sitgreaves Expedition. The War Department explored the navi- 

 gable waters from the south in 1858 but stopped at the foot of the 

 canyons. 



