who has gone before, and the Patties and the Jedediah Smiths are
forgotten. In these later years some who have dared the terrors of the
merciless river in the Grand Canyon spoke of it as the "Great Unknown,"
forgetting the deed of Powell; and when Lieutenant Wheeler laboriously
succeeded in dragging his boats up to the mouth of Diamond Creek, he
said: "NOW the exploration is completed." HE forgot the deed of Powell.
A recent writer mentions the north-western corner of Arizona as a
"mysterious wilderness."* He forgot that it was thoroughly explored
years ago. Wilderness it may be, if that means sparsely settled, but
mysterious?--no. It is all known and on record.

* Ray Stannard Baker, Century Magazine, May, 1902.

The Grand Canyon may be likened to an inverted mountain range. Imagine
a great mountain chain cast upside down in plaster. Then all the former
ridges and spurs of the range become tributary canyons and gulches
running back twenty or thirty miles into the surrounding country,
growing shallower and shallower as the distance increases from the
central core, just as the great spurs and ridges of a mountain range,
descending, melt finally into the plain. Often there are parts where
the central gorge is narrow and precipitous, just as a mountain range
frequently possesses mighty precipices. But it is an error to think of
great canyons as mere slits in the ground, dark and gloomy, like a deep
well from whose depths stars may be sighted at midday. Minor canyons
sometimes approach this character, as, for example, the canyon of the
upper Virgen, called Parunuweap, fifteen hundred feet deep and no more
than twenty to thirty feet wide, with vertical walls, but I have never
been in a canyon from which stars were visible in daylight, nor have I
ever known anyone who had. The light is about the same as that at the
bottom of a narrow street flanked by very high buildings. The walls
may sometimes be gloomy from their colour, or may seem so from the
circumstances under which one views them, but aside from the fact that
any deep, shut-in valley or canyon may become oppressive, there is
nothing specially gloomy about a deep canyon. The sun usually falls more
or less in every canyon, no matter how narrow or deep. It may fall to
the very bottom most of the day, or only for an hour or two, depending
on the trend of the canyon with reference to the sun's course. At the
bottom of the Kanab where it joins the Grand, the sunlig