watcher on the rim.

Another, reaching the Canyon at night, declared that she and her companions
seemed to be "standing in midair, while below, the dark depths were lost in
blackness and mystery." Again mere words! words! For whoever stood in
mid-air?

Still another calls it "the most ineffable thing that exists within the
range of man," and later explains when he stands on the brink of it; "And
where the Grand Canyon begins, words stop." Yet he goes on and uses about
four more pages of words, and pictures after words have stopped, to tell
what he felt and saw. And the remarkable thing is that his experience is
that of all the wisest men who have ever seen it. They know they cannot
describe it, but they proceed to exhaust their vocabularies in talking
about it, and in trying to make clear to others what they saw and felt. And
in this very fact what a wonderful tribute lies to the power of the Canyon;
that a wise and prudent man is led to strive to do what he vows he will not
do, and knows he cannot do.

One well-known poet exclaims: "It was like sudden death." yet she is
still alive. Again, after breakfast, she wrote: "My courage rose to meet
the greatness of the world." Then she "crawled half prostrate" to the
barest and highest rocks she could find on the rim, and confessed: "It
made a coward of me; I shrank and shut my eyes, and felt crushed and beaten
under the intolerable burden of the flesh. For humanity intrudes here; in
these warm and glowing purple spaces disembodied spirits must range and
soar, souls purged and purified and infinitely daring." Yet here I have
heard the wild brayings of hungry mules and the worse ravings of angry
men--none of them impressed as was the soul of the poet.