The canon, with all its two hundred and forty miles of marvels and perils, presented itself to his imagination as a unity.  The first step within it placed him under an enchantment from which there was no escape until the whole circuit of the spell should be completed.  He was like Orlando in the magic garden, when the gate vanished immediately upon his entrance, leaving him no choice but to press on from trial to trial.  He was no more free to pause or turn back than Grecian ghosts sailing down Acheron toward the throne of Radamanthus.

Direct statement, and even the higher speech of simile, fail to describe the Great Canon and the emotion which it produces.  Were its fronting precipices organs, with their mountainous columns and pilasters for organ-pipes, they might produce a de profundis worthy of the scene and of its sentiments, its inspiration.  This is not bombast; so far from exaggerating it does not even attain to the subject; no words can so much as outline the effects of eighty leagues of mountain sculptured by a great river.

Let us venture one comparison.  Imagine a groove a foot broad and twenty feet deep, with a runnel of water trickling at the bottom of it and a fleck of dust floating down the rivulet.  Now increase the dimensions until the groove is two hundred and fifty feet in breadth by five thousand feet in depth, and the speck a boat with three voyagers.  You have the Great Canon of the Colorado and Thurstane and his comrades seeking its issue.

“Do you call this a counthry?” asked Sweeny, after an awe-stricken silence.  “I’m thinkin’ we’re gittin’ outside av the worrld like.”

“An’ I’m thinkin’ we’re gittin’ too fur inside on’t,” muttered Glover.  “Look’s ’s though we might slip clean under afore long.  Most low-spirited hole I ever rolled into.  ’Minds me ‘f that last ditch people talk of dyin’ in.  Must say I’d rather be in the trough ’f the sea.”

“An’ what kind av a trough is that?” inquired Sweeny, inquisitive even in his dumps.

“It’s the trough where they feed the niggers out to the sharks.”

“Faix, an’ I’d loike to see it at feedin’ time,” answered Sweeny with a feeble chuckle.

Nature as it is is one image; nature as it appears is a thousand; or rather it is infinite.  Every soul is a mirror, reflecting what faces it; but the reflections differ as do the souls that give them.  To the three men who now gazed on the Great Canon it was far from being the same object.

Sweeny surveyed it as an old Greek or Roman might, with simple distaste and horror.  Glover, ignorant and limited as he was, received far more of its inspiration.  Even while “chirking up” his companions with trivial talk and jests he was in his secret soul thinking of Bunyan’s Dark Valley and Milton’s Hell, the two sublimest landscapes that had ever been presented to his imagination.  Thurstane, gifted with much of the sympathy of the great Teutonic race for nature, was far more profoundly affected.  The overshadowing altitudes and majesties of the chasm moved him as might oratorios or other solemn music.  Frequently he forgot hardships, dangers, isolation, the hard luck of the past, the ugly prospects of the future in reveries which were a succession of such emotions as wonder, worship, and love.