IO JOHN BURROUGHS 



line here and there on the green purple plain, the opposite 

 rim of the great gorge. 



Near noon we reached a break, or huge gateway, in the 

 basaltic rocks, and were upon the brink of the canyon 

 itself. It was a sudden vision of elemental grandeur and 

 power opening up at our feet. Our eyes have been rev- 

 eling in purple distances, in the soft tints of the sage- 

 brush plain, and in the flowers and long gentle flowing 

 hills — when suddenly the earth opens and we look into 

 a rocky chasm nearly a thousand feet deep with the river 

 and the falls roaring at the bottom of it. The grand, the 

 terrible, the sublime are sprung upon us in a twinkling. 

 The chasm is probably a mile or more broad, with per- 

 pendicular sides of toppling columnar lava eight hundred 

 feet high. A roadway, carved out of the avalanches of 

 loose rocks that hang upon the sides of the awful gulf, 

 winds down to the river and to the cable ferry above the 

 falls. Our party, in detached groups, make slow progress 

 down to this ferry — there is so much to arrest and fasci- 

 nate the attention; the new, strange birds, such as the 

 white-throated swift, the violet-backed swallow, the 

 strange and beautiful wild flowers in the rocks, the rocks 

 themselves in toppling six-sided columns, the spray from 

 the falls below us rising up over the chasm — these and 

 other features make us tarry long by the way. 



In order to get to the front of the falls and pluck out 

 the heart of the sublimity the traveler must cross to the 

 south side of the river, at this point less than half a mile 

 wide. Here the shore recedes in broad irregular terraces, 

 upon one of which stands a comfortable summer hotel. 

 Scaling slippery and perilous rocky points near it, we stand 

 on the very brink of the chasm and take our fill of the 

 awful and the sublime as born of cliff and cataract. We 

 cling to stretched ropes and wires and peer down into the 

 abyss. Elemental displays on such a scale crowd all 



