It is beautiful, oh, how beautiful! but it is a beauty that awakens a feeling of solemnity and awe.  We call it the “Divine Abyss.”  It seems as much of heaven as of earth.  Of the many descriptions of it, none seems adequate.  To rave over it, or to pour into it a torrent of superlatives, is of little avail.  My companion came nearer the mark when she quietly repeated from Revelation, “And he carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem.”  It does, indeed, suggest a far-off, half-sacred antiquity, some greater Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, or India.  We speak of it as a scene:  it is more like a vision, so foreign is it to all other terrestrial spectacles, and so surpassingly beautiful.

To ordinary folk the sight is so extraordinary, so unlike everything one’s experience has yielded, and so unlike the results of the usual haphazard working of the blind forces of nature, that I did not wonder when people whom I met on the rim asked me what I supposed did all this.  I could even sympathize with the remark of an old woman visitor who is reported to have said that she thought they had built the canon too near the hotel.  The enormous cleavage which the canon shows, the abrupt drop from the brink of thousands of feet, the sheer faces of perpendicular walls of dizzy height, give at first the impression that it is all the work of some titanic quarryman, who must have removed cubic miles of strata as we remove cubic yards of earth.  Go out to Hopi Point or O’Neil’s Point, and, as you emerge from the woods, you get a glimpse of a blue or rose-purple gulf opening before you.  The solid ground ceases suddenly, and an aerial perspective, vast and alluring, takes its place; another heaven, countersunk in the earth, transfixes you on the brink.  “Great God!” I can fancy the first beholder of it saying, “what is this?  Do I behold the transfiguration of the earth?  Has the solid ground melted into thin air?  Is there a firmament below as well as above?  Has the earth veil at last been torn aside, and the red heart of the globe been laid bare?” If this first witness was not at once overcome by the beauty of the earthly revelation before him, or terrified by its strangeness and power, he must have stood long, awed, spellbound, speechless with astonishment, and thrilled with delight.  He may have seen vast and glorious prospects from mountaintops, he may have looked down upon the earth and seen it unroll like a map before him; but he had never before looked into the earth as through a mighty window or open door, and beheld depths and gulfs of space, with their atmospheric veils and illusions and vast perspectives, such as he had seen from mountain-summits, but with a wealth of color and a suggestion of architectural and monumental remains, and a strange, almost unearthly beauty, such as no mountain-view could ever have afforded him.  Three features of the canon strike one at once:  its unparalleled magnitude, its architectural forms