II

Hence it is that when one reaches the Grand canon of the Colorado, if he has kept his eyes and mind open, he is prepared to see striking and unusual things.  But he cannot be fully prepared for just what he does see, no matter how many pictures of it he may have seen, or how many descriptions of it he may have read.

A friend of mine who took a lively interest in my Western trip wrote me that he wished he could have been present with his kodak when we first looked upon the Grand Canon.  Did he think he could have got a picture of our souls?  His camera would have shown him only our silent, motionless forms as we stood transfixed by that first view of the stupendous spectacle.  Words do not come readily to one’s lips, or gestures to one’s body, in the presence of such a scene.  One of my companions said that the first thing that came into her mind was the old text, “Be still, and know that I am God.”  To be still on such an occasion is the easiest thing in the world, and to feel the surge of solemn and reverential emotions is equally easy; is, indeed, almost inevitable.  The immensity of the scene, its tranquillity, its order, its strange, new beauty, and the monumental character of its many forms—­all these tend to beget in the beholder an attitude of silent wonder and solemn admiration.  I wished at the moment that we might have been alone with the glorious spectacle,—­that we had hit upon an hour when the public had gone to dinner.  The smoking and joking tourists sauntering along in apparent indifference, or sitting with their backs to the great geologic drama, annoyed me.  I pity the person who can gaze upon the spectacle unmoved.  Some are actually terrified by it.  I was told of a strong man, an eminent lawyer from a Western city, who literally fell to the earth at the first view, and could not again be induced to look upon it.  I saw a woman prone upon the ground near the brink at Hopi Point, weeping silently and long; but from what she afterward told me I know it was not from terror or sorrow, but from the overpowering gladness of the ineffable beauty and harmony of the scene.  It moved her like the grandest music.  Her inebriate soul could find relief only in tears.

Harriet Monroe was so wrought up by the first view that she says she had to fight against the desperate temptation to fling herself down into the soft abyss, and thus redeem the affront which the very beating of her heart had offered to the inviolable solitude.  Charles Dudley Warner said of it, “I experienced for a moment an indescribable terror of nature, a confusion of mind, a fear to be alone in such a presence.”