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By Golden Webb
The
crown jewel of America's national park system, the Grand Canyon extends its
incomparable majesty for more than 200 miles across the desert highlands of
northern Arizona. There is perhaps no landscape on earth more astonishing than
this majestic chasm of vermillion cliffs, purple abysses, golden temples and
rushing waters.
The reaction of people when they look over the Canyon's edge runs from fear to awe to reverie to delight. "I fainted when I saw that awful-looking canyon," sniffed 19th Century tourist Gertrude B. Stevens. "I never wanted a drink so bad in my life. Goodbye." A little less dumbstruck and a little more love-struck was the poet Carl Sandburg, who described the drama of a Grand Canyon sunset: "There goes God with an army of banners."
If you look as long and as hard and as lovingly as Sandburg did, you might pick out the "battering rams, blind mules, mounted policemen," and "trucks hauling caverns of granite," that Sandburg thought he could see in the Canyon's depths. He also saw "elephants grappling gorillas in a death strange, cathedrals, arenas, platforms, somersaults of telescoped train wrecks, exhausted eggheads, piles of skulls, mountains of empty sockets, mummies of kings and mobs, memories of work gangs and wrecking crews, sobs of wind and water storms, all frozen and held on paths leading on to spirals of new zigzags . . ."
Most likely you'll see something completely different — something new. As Frederick Dellenbaugh wrote, the scene from the rim "is so weird and lonely and so incomprehensible in its novelty that one feels that it could never have been viewed before."
