In the morning at eight o’clock there were great irregular black shadows under the domes and peaks and escarpments.  Bright Angel Canyon was all dark, showing dimly its ragged lines.  At noon there were no shadows and all the colossal gorge lay glaring under the sun.  In the evening Carley watched the Canyon as again the sun was setting.

Deep dark-blue shadows, like purple sails of immense ships, in wonderful contrast with the bright sunlit slopes, grew and rose toward the east, down the canyons and up the walls that faced the west.  For a long while there was no red color, and the first indication of it was a dull bronze.  Carley looked down into the void, at the sailing birds, at the precipitous slopes, and the dwarf spruces and the weathered old yellow cliffs.  When she looked up again the shadows out there were no longer dark.  They were clear.  The slopes and depths and ribs of rock could be seen through them.  Then the tips of the highest peaks and domes turned bright red.  Far to the east she discerned a strange shadow, slowly turning purple.  One instant it grew vivid, then began to fade.  Soon after that all the colors darkened and slowly the pale gray stole over all.

At night Carley gazed over and into the black void.  But for the awful sense of depth she would not have known the Canyon to be there.  A soundless movement of wind passed under her.  The chasm seemed a grave of silence.  It was as mysterious as the stars and as aloof and as inevitable.  It had held her senses of beauty and proportion in abeyance.

At another sunrise the crown of the rim, a broad belt of bare rock, turned pale gold under its fringed dark line of pines.  The tips of the peak gleamed opal.  There was no sunrise red, no fire.  The light in the east was a pale gold under a steely green-blue sky.  All the abyss of the Canyon was soft, gray, transparent, and the belt of gold broadened downward, making shadows on the west slopes of the mesas and escarpments.  Far down in the shadows she discerned the river, yellow, turgid, palely gleaming.  By straining her ears Carley heard a low dull roar as of distant storm.  She stood fearfully at the extreme edge of a stupendous cliff, where it sheered dark and forbidding, down and down, into what seemed red and boundless depths of Hades.  She saw gold spots of sunlight on the dark shadows, proving that somewhere, impossible to discover, the sun was shining through wind-worn holes in the sharp ridges.  Every instant Carley grasped a different effect.  Her studied gaze absorbed an endless changing.  And at last she realized that sun and light and stars and moon and night and shade, all working incessantly and mutably over shapes and lines and angles and surfaces too numerous and too great for the sight of man to hold, made an ever-changing spectacle of supreme beauty and colorful grandeur.

She talked very little while at the Canyon.  It silenced her.  She had come to see it at the critical time of her life and in the right mood.  The superficialities of the world shrunk to their proper insignificance.  Once she asked her aunt:  “Why did not Glenn bring me here?” As if this Canyon proved the nature of all things!