The Grand Canyon [antikvár]

1/ A Wilderness of StoneThe scene is so weird and lonely and so incomprehensible in its novelty that one feels that it couldnever have been viewed before.FREDERICK S. DELLENBAUGH/ THE ROMANCE OF THE COLOR ADO RIVERThere is no landscape on earth that is more astonishing than the Grand Canyon of Arizona. When a man first stands on its rim and images of the Canyon flash through his nerves to his mind, the mind reacts like a badly programed computer signaling "input not acceptable" or "reject." Or so at least do the minds of most people except Southwestern Indians, who have been looking at the Grand Canyon for a long time. However, most Americans are of European ancestry and have acquired from their forebears a far different idea of what a landscape should and should not be. It ought to have relatively modest colors and contours. It ought to have some restraint. It ought not to have purple abysses, vermilion cliffs and stone rainbows flinching under a sun that clangs across the sky like a cymbal.The Grand Canyon is 277 miles long, a mile deep and as much as 18 miles wide. All of it has been carved out by erosionby the Colorado River and the subtle but overpowering forces of snowflakes, raindrops and air. It is full of precipices, amphitheaters, buttes, slopes, spires, temples and nameless shapes in red, gold, pink, green, rust, orange, mauve and a good many other colors. The shapes within the Canyon, viewed at different times, seem to be moving. At midday they appear to withdraw to the sides, flattening themselves against the many-layered walls as though they feared the sun. Then, as the day dwindles and the light slants, they come marching forth again in a way that made the poet