[Illustration:  NEAR THE TEMPLE OF SET.]

[Illustration:  HANCE’S TRAIL, LOOKING UP.]

The coloring of the Grand Canon is no less extraordinary than its forms.  Nature has saved this chasm from being a terrific scene of desolation by glorifying all that it contains.  Wall after wall, turret after turret, and mountain range after mountain range belted with tinted strata, succeed one another here like billows petrified in glowing colors.  These hues are not as brilliant and astonishing in their variety as are the colors of the Yellowstone Canon, but their subdued and sombre tones are perfectly suited to the awe-inspiring place which they adorn.  The prominent tints are yellow, red, maroon, and a dull purple, as if the glory of unnumbered sunsets, fading from these rugged cliffs, had been in part imprisoned here.  Yet, somehow, specimens of these colored rocks lose all their brilliancy and beauty when removed from their environment, like sea-shells from the beach; a verification of the sentiment so beautifully expressed in the lines of Emerson: 

  “I wiped away the weeds and foam,
  I fetched my sea-born treasures home;
  But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
  Had left their beauty on the shore,
  With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”

[Illustration:  MIST IN THE CANON.]

To stand upon the edge of this stupendous gorge, as it receives its earliest greeting from the god of day, is to enjoy in a moment compensation for long years of ordinary uneventful life.  When I beheld the scene, a little before daybreak, a lake of soft, white clouds was floating round the summits of the Canon mountains, hiding the huge crevasse beneath, as a light coverlet of snow conceals a chasm in an Alpine glacier.  I looked with awe upon this misty curtain of the morn, for it appeared to me symbolic of the grander curtain of the past which shuts out from our view the awful struggles of the elements enacted here when the grand gulf was being formed.  At length, however, as the light increased, this thin, diaphanous covering was mysteriously withdrawn, and when the sun’s disk rose above the horizon, the huge facades of the temples which looked eastward grew immediately rosy with the dawn; westward, projecting cliffs sketched on the opposite sides of the ravines, in dark blue silhouettes, the evanescent forms of castles, battlements, and turrets from which some shreds of white mist waved like banners of capitulation; stupendous moats beneath them were still black with shadow; while clouds filled many of the minor canons, like vapors rising from enormous cauldrons.  Gradually, as the solar couriers forced a passage into the narrow gullies, and drove the remnant of night’s army from its hiding-places, innumerable shades of purple, yellow, red, and brown appeared, varying according to the composition of the mountains, and the enormous void was gradually filled to the brim with a luminous haze, which one could fancy was the smoke of incense