Surely nowhere else
are there illustrations so striking of the natural beauty of desolation
and death, so many of nature's own mountain buildings wasting in glory of
high desert air--going to dust. See how steadfast in beauty they all are
in their going. Look again and again how the rough, dusty boulders and
sand of disintegration from the upper ledges wreathe in beauty the next
and next below with these wonderful taluses, and how the colors are finer
the faster the waste. We oftentimes see nature giving beauty for ashes,--as
in the flowers of a prairie after fire,--but here the very dust and ashes
are beautiful.
Gazing across the mighty chasm, we at last discover that it is not its
great depth nor length, nor yet these wonderful buildings, that most
impresses us. It is its immense width, sharply defined by precipitous
walls plunging suddenly down from a flat plain, declaring in terms
instantly apprehended that the vast gulf is a gash in the once unbroken
plateau, made by slow, orderly erosion and removal of huge beds of rocks.
Other valleys of erosion are as great,--in all their dimensions some
are greater,--but none of these produces an effect on the imagination
at once so quick and profound, coming without study, given at a glance.
Therefore by far the greatest and most influential feature of this view
from Bright Angel or any other of the canon views is the opposite wall.
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