they
not dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter. Imagine
walls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at their base
holes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the Olden World and
never know they were there--or miss them either. Imagine a trail that
winds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars like a bird, and
finally bores like a worm and is gone.

Imagine a great cloud-shadow cruising along from point to point, growing
smaller and smaller still, until it seems no more than a shifting purple
bruise upon the cheek of a mountain, and then, as you watch it, losing
itself in a tiny rift which at that distance looks like a wrinkle in the
seamed face of an old squaw, but which is probably a huge gash gored
into the solid rock for a thousand feet of depth and more than a
thousand feet of width.

Imagine, way down there at the bottom, a stream visible only at certain
favored points because of the mighty intervening ribs and chines of
rock--a stream that appears to you as a torpidly crawling yellow worm,
its wrinkling back spangled with tarnished white specks, but which is
really a wide, deep, brawling, rushing river--the Colorado--full of
torrents and rapids; and those white specks you see are the tops of
enormous rocks in its bed.

Imagine--if it be winter--snowdrifts above, with desert flowers blooming
alongside the drifts, and down below great stretches of green verdure;
imagine two or three separate snowstorms visibly raging at different
points, with clear, bright stretches of distance intervening between
them, and nearer maybe a splendid rainbow arching downward into the
great void; for these meteorological three-ring circuses are not
uncommon at certain seasons.

Imagine all this spread out beneath the unflawed turquoise of the
Arizona sky and washed in the liquid gold of the Arizona sunshine--and
if you imagine hard enough and keep it up long enough you may begin, in
the course of eight or ten years, to have a faint, a very faint and
shadowy conception of this spot where the shamed scheme of creation is
turned upside down and the very womb of the world is laid bare before
our impious eyes. Then go to Arizona and see it all for yourself, and
you will realize what an entirely inadequate and deficient thing the
human imagination is.

It is customary for the newly arrived visitor to take a ride along the
edge of the canyon--the rim-drive, it is called--with stops at Hopi