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"I'm going to dress," said Beth, breaking the silence at last. "It seems a sin to stay cooped up in here when such a glorious panorama is at one's feet." The others did not reply in words, but they all began to dress together with nervous haste, and then made their way down to the canyon's brink.
At one place our course led us through a little canyon about two miles long, and scarcely more than two hundred feet deep. This was Swallow Canyon a name suggested by the many birds of that species which had covered the canyon's walls with their little clay nests. The openings of some of these nests were so small that it scarcely seemed possible for a bird to enter.
The material for making the road was at hand, for the most part, and by the end of the summer there was a broad oiled macadam road, grade carefully proportioned to grade, leading to the canyon's brim. It was a road built to withstand the wear of thousands of tons of freight that must be hauled over it.
Somehow, by the time I was into my teens, I was conscious of the great loss to the world in the disappearance of the spiritual side of Indian life. I knew the Canyon well by then and I knew the Indians well and the beauty of their ceremonies was even then more or less merged in my mind with the beauty of the Canyon. Their mysticism was the Canyon's mysticism.
I have been over the stretch twice, once at low water and again at high, so I speak from abundant experience. Naively he remarks, "as yet they had seen no natural bridge spanning the chasm above them, nor had fall or cataract prevented their safe advance!" Yet they are supposed to have passed through the forty-one miles of Cataract Canyon's turmoil, which I venture to say no man could ever forget.
A day and a night beyond this we were debarking at Williams, Arizona, and in due time reached our real hiding-place; a comfortable ranch house within easy riding distance of that most majestic of immensities, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It was Polly's idea; the choice of a quiet retreat as against the social attractions of the great hotel on the canyon's brink.
The canyon's sides lifted like tawny castles in the same light. Where I walked the odor of thousands of wild roses hung over the margin where the thickets grew. High in the upper air, magpies were sailing across the silent blue.
"All the claim-jumpin' they'll do won't hurt nobody," Casey observed unexcitedly, when he had set the Little Woman down on a rock beside his location "cut" in the canyon's side. "She likely picked on a white man so's he could locate under the law, but this claim's located a'ready." He waved a hand toward the monument, a few rods up the canyon.
The descent was a long, rough, dangerous business, but Maurice had learned many a climbing trick from the habits of the mountain goat, and at last he stood at the canyon's bottom, a tired, lonely but courageous bit of boyhood, ready to suffer and dare anything so long as he could prove himself worthy of the trust that his father had placed in his strong young hands.
The first impressions, maybe, are productive of physical and mental excitement. But when the traveler comes into complete harmony with the Grand Canyon's sublime features, bodily rest and mental tranquillity are sure to follow.
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