Of course with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our
wilderness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are
bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as
if stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads,
are frightened from the groves. Too often the groves also vanish,
leaving nothing but ashes. Fortunately, nature has a few big places
beyond man's power to spoil--the ocean, the two icy ends of the globe,
and the Grand Canon.
When I first heard of the Santa Fe trains running to the edge of
the Grand Canon of Arizona, I was troubled with thoughts of the
disenchantment likely to follow. But last winter, when I saw those
trains crawling along through the pines of the Cocanini Forest and
close up to the brink of the chasm at Bright Angel, I was glad to
discover that in the presence of such stupendous scenery they are
nothing. The locomotives and trains are mere beetles and caterpillars,
and the noise they make is as little disturbing as the hooting of an
owl in the lonely woods.
In a dry, hot, monotonous forested plateau, seemingly boundless, you
come suddenly and without warning upon the abrupt edge of a gigantic
sunken landscape of the wildest, most multitudinous features, and
those features, sharp and angular, are made out of flat beds of
limestone and sandstone forming a spiry, jagged, gloriously colored
mountain-range countersunk in a level gray plain.
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