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 ages was flung at me.  A man became nothing.  But when I gazed across that sublime and majestic wilderness, in which the Grand Canyon was only a dim line, I strangely lost my terror and something came to me across the shining spaces.

Then Nas ta Bega and Wetherill began the descent of the slope, and the rest of us followed.  No sign of a trail showed where the base of the slope rolled out to meet the green plain.  There was a level bench a mile wide, then a ravine, and then an ascent, and after that, rounded ridge and ravine, one after the other, like huge swells of a monstrous sea.  Indian paint brush vied in its scarlet hue with the deep magenta of cactus.  There was no sage.  Soap weed and meager grass and a bunch of cactus here and there lent the green to that barren, and it was green only at a distance.