awful presence. We walk a few steps through the pine trees from the
camp and suddenly find ourselves upon the Cañon's edge. Just before
reaching it, I halted for a moment, as has always been my wont when
approaching for the first time any natural or historic object that I
have longed for years to look upon. Around me rose the stately pines;
behind me was a simple stretch of rolling woodland; nothing betrayed
the nearness of one of the greatest wonders of the world. Could it
be possible that I was to be disappointed? At last I hurried
through the intervening space, gave a quick look, and almost reeled.
The globe itself seemed to have suddenly yawned asunder, leaving me
trembling on the hither brink of two dissevered hemispheres. Vast as
the bed of a vanished ocean, deep as Mount Washington, riven from its
apex to its base, the grandest cañon on our planet lay glittering
below me in the sunlight like a submerged continent, drowned by an
ocean that had ebbed away. At my very feet, so near that I could have
leaped at once into eternity, the earth was cleft to a depth of six
thousand six hundred feet--not by a narrow gorge, like other cañons,
but by an awful gulf within whose cavernous immensity the forests of
the Adirondacks would appear like jackstraws, the Hudson Palisades
would be an insignificant stratum, Niagara would be indiscernible,
and cities could be tossed like pebbles.

[Illustration: THE EARTH-GULF OF ARIZONA.]

[Illustration: A PORTION OF THE GULF.]

[Illustration: "A VAST, INCOMPARABLE VOID."]

As brain grew steadier and vision clearer, I saw, directly opposite,
the other side of the Cañon thirteen miles away. It was a mountain