t I was to be disappointed? At last I hurried
through the intervening space, gave a quick look, and almost reeled.
The globe itself seemed to have suddenly yawned asunder, leaving me
trembling on the hither brink of two dissevered hemispheres. Vast as
the bed of a vanished ocean, deep as Mount Washington, riven from its
apex to its base, the grandest canon on our planet lay glittering
below me in the sunlight like a submerged continent, drowned by an
ocean that had ebbed away. At my very feet, so near that I could have
leaped at once into eternity, the earth was cleft to a depth of six
thousand six hundred feet--not by a narrow gorge, like other canons,
but by an awful gulf within whose cavernous immensity the forests of
the Adirondacks would appear like jackstraws, the Hudson Palisades
would be an insignificant stratum, Niagara would be indiscernible,
and cities could be tossed like pebbles.

[Illustration: THE EARTH-GULF OF ARIZONA.]

[Illustration: A PORTION OF THE GULF.]

[Illustration: "A VAST, INCOMPARABLE VOID."]

As brain grew steadier and vision clearer, I saw, directly opposite,
the other side of the Canon thirteen miles away. It was a mountain
wall, a mile in height, extending to the right and left as far as the
eye could reach; and since the cliff upon which I was standing was
its counterpart, it seemed to me as if these parallel banks were once
the shore-lines of a vanished sea. Between them lay a vast,
incomparable void, two hundred miles in length, presenting an
unbroken panorama to the east and west until the gaze could follow it
no farther. Try to conceive what these dimensions mean by realizing
that a strip of the State of Massachusetts, thirteen miles in width,
and reaching from Boston to Albany, could be laid as a covering over
this Canon, from one end to the other; and that if the entire range
of the White Mountains were flung into it, the monstrous pit would
still remain comparatively empty! Even now it is by no means without
contents; for, as I gazed with awe and wonder into its colossal area,
I seemed to be looking down upon a colored relief-map of the mountain
systems of the continent. It is not strictly one canon, but a
labyrinth of canons, in many of which the whole Yosemite could be
packed away and lost. Thus one of them, the Marble Canon, is of
itself more than three thousand feet deep and sixty-six miles long.
In every direction I beheld below me a tangled skein of mountain
ranges, tho