yers of sandstone,
marble, and granite, thousands of feet in thickness; to carve the
mighty shrines of Siva and of Vishnu, and to etch out these scores of
interlacing canons! To calculate it one must reckon a century for
every turn of the hourglass. It is the story of a struggle maintained
for ages between the solid and the fluid elements, in which at last
the yielding water won a victory over adamant. It is an evidence,
too, of Nature's patient methods; a triumph of the delicate over the
strong, the liquid over the solid, the transitory over the enduring.
At present, the softer material has been exhausted, and the rapacious
river, shrunken in size, must satisfy itself by gnawing only the
archaic granite which still curbs its course. Yet if this
calculation overpowers us, what shall we say of the reflections
awakened by the fact that all the limestone cliffs along the lofty
edges of the Canon are composed of fossils,--the skeletons of
creatures that once lived here covered by an ocean, and that ten
thousand feet of strata, which formerly towered above the present
summits of the Canon walls, have been eroded and swept downward to
the sea! Hence, were the missing strata (all of which are found in
regular sequence in the high plateaus of Utah) restored, this Canon
would be sixteen thousand feet in depth, and from its borders one
could look down upon a mountain higher than Mont Blanc! To calculate
the aeons implied in the repeated elevations and subsidences which
made this region what it is would be almost to comprehend eternity.
In such a retrospect centuries crumble and disappear into the gulf of
Time as pebbles into the Canon of the Colorado.

On my last evening in the pine tree camp I left my tent and walked
alone to the edge of the Grand Canon. The night was white with the
splendor of the moon. A shimmering lake of silvery vapor rolled its
noiseless tide against the mountains, and laved the terraces of the
Hindu shrines. The lunar radiance, falling into such profundity, was
powerless to reveal the plexus of subordinate canons, and even the
temples glimmered through the upper air like wraiths of the huge
forms which they reveal by day. Advancing cautiously to an isolated
point upon the brink, I lay upon my face, and peered down into the
spectral void. No voice of man, nor cry of bird, nor roar of beast
resounded through those awful corridors of silence. Even thought had
no existence in that sunken realm of chaos. I fel