Of all the various kinds of ornamental work displayed,—­carving, tracery on cliff-faces, moldings, arches, pinnacles,—­none is more admirably effective or charms more than the webs of rain-channeled taluses.  Marvelously extensive, without the slightest appearance of waste or excess, they cover roofs and dome-tops and the base of every cliff, belt each spire and pyramid and massy, towering temple, and in beautiful continuous lines go sweeping along the great walls in and out around all the intricate system of side-canons, amphitheaters, cirques, and scallops into which they are sculptured.  From one point hundreds of miles of this fairy embroidery may be traced.  It is all so fine and orderly that it would seem that not only had the clouds and streams been kept harmoniously busy in the making of it, but that every raindrop sent like a bullet to a mark had been the subject of a separate thought, so sure is the outcome of beauty through the stormy centuries.  Surely nowhere else are there illustrations so striking of the natural beauty of desolation and death, so many of nature’s own mountain buildings wasting in glory of high desert air—­going to dust.  See how steadfast in beauty they all are in their going.  Look again and again how the rough, dusty boulders and sand of disintegration from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty the next and next below with these wonderful taluses, and how the colors are finer the faster the waste.  We oftentimes see nature giving beauty for ashes,—­as in the flowers of a prairie after fire,—­but here the very dust and ashes are beautiful.

Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most impresses us.  It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once unbroken plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge beds of rocks.  Other valleys of erosion are as great,—­in all their dimensions some are greater,—­but none of these produces an effect on the imagination at once so quick and profound, coming without study, given at a glance.  Therefore by far the greatest and most influential feature of this view from Bright Angel or any other of the canon views is the opposite wall.  Of the one beneath our feet we see only fragmentary sections in cirques and amphitheaters and on the sides of the outjutting promontories between them, while the other, though far distant, is beheld in all its glory of color and noble proportions—­the one supreme beauty and wonder to which the eye is ever turning.  For while charming with its beauty it tells the story of the stupendous erosion of the canon—­the foundation of the unspeakable impression made on everybody.  It seems a gigantic statement for even nature to make, all in one mighty stone word, apprehended at once like a burst of light, celestial color its natural vesture, coming in glory to mind and heart as to a home prepared for it from the very beginning.  Wildness so godful, cosmic, primeval, bestows a new sense of earth’s beauty and size.  Not even from high mountains does the world seem so wide, so like a star in glory of light on its way through the heavens.