Grand
Canyon of the Colorado. And there, that blue fork in the red, that's
where the San Juan comes in. And there's Escalante Canyon."

I had to adopt the Indian's method of studying unlimited spaces in the
desert--to look with slow contracted eyes from near to far.

The pack-train and the drivers had begun to zigzag down a long slope,
bare of rock, with scant strips of green, and here and there a cedar.
Half a mile down, the slope merged in what seemed a green level. But I
knew it was not level. This level was a rolling plain, growing darker
green, with lines of ravines and thin, undefined spaces that might be
mirage. Miles and miles it swept and rolled and heaved, to lose its
waves in apparent darker level. Round red rocks stood isolated.
They resembled huge grazing cattle. But as I gazed these rocks were
strangely magnified. They grew and grew into mounds, castles, domes,
crags, great red wind-carved buttes. One by one they drew my gaze
to the wall of upflung rock. I seemed to see a thousand domes of a
thousand shapes and colors, and among them a thousand blue clefts,
each of which was a canyon.

Beyond this wide area of curved lines rose another wall, dwarfing the
lower; dark red, horizon-long, magnificent in frowning boldness, and
because of its limitless deceiving surfaces incomprehensible to the
gaze of man. Away to the eastward began a winding ragged blue line,
looping back upon itself, and then winding away again, growing wider
and bluer. This line was San Juan Canyon. I followed that blue line
all its length, a hundred miles, down toward the west where it joined
a dark purple shadowy cleft. And this was the Grand Canyon of the
Colorado. My eye swept along with that winding mark, farther and
farther to the west, until the cleft, growing larger and closer,
revealed itself as a wild and winding canyon. Still farther westward
it split a vast plateau of red peaks and yellow mesas. Here the canyon
was full of purple smoke. It turned, it closed, it gaped, it lost
itself and showed again in that chaos of a million cliffs. And then it
faded, a mere purple line, into deceiving distance.

I imagined there was no scene in all the world to equal this. The
tranquillity of lesser spaces was here not manifest. This happened to
be a place where so much of the desert could be seen and the effect
was stupendous Sound, movement, life seemed to have no fitness here.
Ruin was there and desolation and decay. The meaning of the