I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of one formed, eons after, at the top.  They be brothers both, formed by the same forces and for the same end.

Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done.  A whole day is taken to go down the gorge to the river.  It takes seven miles of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile.  It was an immense day’s work.

The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn seen close by from its Hoernli shoulder.

There was the river—­a regular freight train, running day and night, the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the elevated road of the upper air)—­burdened with dissolved rock and earth.

A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea.  What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages!  In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.

In the side canon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it was easy to see the work done.  Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile the bottom of a side canon with every variety of stone, from the wall a mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate.  The next rush of waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into the main river.  For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of Milton’s angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South Boston Flats.  Boston made more land than the city originally contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these excavations.

The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared comparatively little.  One gets new meanings of the words almighty, eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require them all.

In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the purpose.  In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of it in extremest peril.  For weeks there was no possibility of climbing to the plateau above.