The Indian runner’s face did not change its blankness, but I felt that he doubted Jondo’s judgment.  That night he slipped away and we never saw him again.

We were all hopeful that night, and hopeful the next morning when we broke camp early.  A trail we had not seen the night before ran up the low ridge to the west of us.  Eloise and I followed it up a little way, riding abreast.  The ridge really was a narrow, rocky tableland, and beyond it was another higher slope, up which the same trail ran.  The trees were growing smaller and the sky flowed broad and blue above their tops.  The ground was only rock, with a thin veneer of soil here and there.  Gnarled, stunted cedars and gray, twisted cypress clung for a roothold to these barren ledges.  The morning breeze swept, sharp and invigorating, out of a broad open space beyond the edge of this rocky woodland height.  Eloise and I pushed on a little farther, leaving the others still on the narrow shelf above our camping-place.

Suddenly, as we rode out of the closer timber to where the scattered growths were hardly higher than our heads, the first heaven and the first earth seemed to pass away—­not in irreverence I write it—­and we stood face to face with a new heaven and a new earth—­where, in the Grand Canon of the Colorado River, the sublimity of the Almighty Builder’s beauty and omnipotence was voiced in one stupendous Word, wrought in enduring color in everlasting stone.  Cleaving its way westward to some far-off sea, a wide abyss, a dozen miles across from lip to lip, yawned down to the very vitals of the earth.  We stood upon the rim of it—­a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet of solid limestone, in one plummet line, to other cliffs below, that dropped again through furlongs of black gneiss, red sandstone, and gray granite.

Beyond this mighty chasm great forest trees were, to our eyes, only as weeds along its rim.  Between that rim and ours we could look down upon high mountain buttes and sloping red tablelands, and dizzy gorges with pinnacled walls and towers and domes—­vast forms no pen will ever picture—­not hurled in wild confusion by titan fury, but symmetrical and purposeful and calm.

Through slowly crawling millions of patiently wearing years, while stars grew old and perished from the firmament, with cloud, and frost, and wind, and water, and sharp cutting sands, these strata of the old earth’s crust were chiseled into gigantic outlines, and all the worn-down, crumbled atoms of debris were swept through long, tortuous leagues of distance toward the sea by a mad river swirling through the lowest depths.  A mile straight down, as the crow never flies here, it rushes, but to us the river was a mere creek, seen only where the lower gorges open to the channel.