Temple of the Earth Mother

This incredible pageantry of sunlight and chasm, I thought, is our nearest approach to fourth-dimensional scenery. The three dimensions are on such a scale that some of the fourth has been added. You do not see, hung before you, the seven million years that went to the making of these walls and their twisted strata, but you feel that some elements of Time have been conjured into these immensities of Space. Perhaps it is not size nor the huge witchery of changing shapes and shades that fill us with awe, but the obscure feeling that here we have an instantaneous vision of innumerable eons. There must be the profoundest of silences there because all the noises made through these years have no existence in this instantaneous vision of the ages, in which the longest time that any individual sound could take would be represented by the tiniest fraction of an inch on these mile-high walls.

There are cliffs and ledges of rock-not such ledges as you may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains... and not such cliffs as you may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit...wherever we look there is but a wilderness of rocks; deep gorges, where the rivers are lost below the cliffs, and towers and pinnacles; and ten thousand strangely carved forms in every direction; and beyond them mountains blending with the clouds.

The discoveries to be made within this Canyon are worth the efforts required to get down.... Within those red walls exist innumerable little worlds, surprising worlds, and hundreds of hidden paradises....

Between the cataracts, the stream outspreads to great width and rushes swiftly by. It is almost always turbid, and generally is charged with a heavy load of sand and silt. On the lowest talus near the brink may be seen lines of high-water mark, some as high as fifty or sixty feet above the ordinary summer stages. Within those stages, the rocks are ground and polished, carved into strange shapes, and worn by potholes from the scouring of the current. All of the boulders are rounded and ground away, or have become carious and crumbly by the chemical reactions of air and water. All things plainly reveal the powerful effects of corrosion acting with extreme energy. We do not wonder at it now. The impetuous rush of the waters charged with sharp sand even at the lower stages is amply suggestive, and the mind is at a loss to conceive what must be the power of the river when its volume is many times multiplied.