erodes easily?"

"You must ask somebody wiser than I."

"Well, let's not perplex our minds with its origin. It is, and that's
enough for any mind. Ah! listen! Now you will hear my Singing Cliffs."

From out of the darkening shadows murmurs rose on the softly rising
wind. This strange music had a depressing influence; but it did not
fill the heart with sorrow, only touched it lightly. And when, with the
dying breeze, the song died away, it left the lonely crags lonelier for
its death.

The last rosy gleam faded from the tip of Point Sublime; and as if that
were a signal, in all the clefts and canyons below, purple, shadowy
clouds marshaled their forces and began to sweep upon the battlements,
to swing colossal wings into amphitheaters where gods might have
warred, slowly to enclose the magical sentinels. Night intervened, and
a moving, changing, silent chaos pulsated under the bright stars.

"How infinite all this is! How impossible to understand!" I exclaimed.

"To me it is very simple," replied my comrade. "The world is strange.
But this canyon--why, we can see it all! I can't make out why people
fuss so over it. I only feel peace. It's only bold and beautiful,
serene and silent."

With the words of this quiet old plainsman, my sentimental passion
shrank to the true appreciation of the scene. Self passed out to the
recurring, soft strains of cliff song. I had been reveling in a species
of indulgence, imagining I was a great lover of nature, building
poetical illusions over storm-beaten peaks. The truth, told by one who
had lived fifty years in the solitudes, among the rugged mountains,
under the dark trees, and by the sides of the lonely streams, was the
simple interpretation of a spirit in harmony with the bold, the
beautiful, the serene, the silent.

He meant the Grand Canyon was only a mood of nature, a bold promise, a
beautiful record. He meant that mountains had sifted away in its dust,
yet the canyon was young. Man was nothing, so let him be humble. This
cataclysm of the earth, this playground of a river was not inscrutable;
it was only inevitable--as inevitable as nature herself. Millions of
years in the bygone ages it had lain serene under a half moon; it would
bask silent under a rayless sun, in the onward edge of time.

It taught simplicity, serenity, peace. The eye that saw only the
strife, the war, the decay, the ruin, or only the glory and the
tragedy, saw not all the truth. It spoke simply, thou