Roughing it De LuxeCobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
General
Roughing it De Luxe
Cobb, Irvin S. (Irvin Shrewsbury)
American wit and humor; California -- Description and travel; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Description and travel
Imagine, if you can, a monster of a hollow approximately some hundreds
of miles long and a mile deep, and anywhere from ten to sixteen miles
wide, with a mountain range--the most wonderful mountain range in the
world--planted in it; so that, viewing the spectacle from above, you get
the illusion of being in a stationary airship, anchored up among the
clouds; imagine these mountain peaks--hundreds upon hundreds of
them--rising one behind the other, stretching away in endless, serried
rank until the eye swims and the mind staggers at the task of trying to
count them; imagine them splashed and splattered over with all the
earthly colors you ever saw and a lot of unearthly colors you never saw
before; imagine them carved and fretted and scrolled into all
shapes--tabernacles, pyramids, battleships, obelisks, Moorish
palaces--the Moorish suggestion is especially pronounced both in
colorings and in shapes--monuments, minarets, temples, turrets, castles,
spires, domes, tents, tepees, wigwams, shafts.
Imagine other ravines opening from the main one, all nuzzling their
mouths in her flanks like so many sucking pigs; for there are hundreds
of these lesser canyons, and any one of them would be a marvel were they
not dwarfed into relative puniness by the mother of the litter. Imagine
walls that rise sheer and awful as the Wrath of God, and at their base
holes where you might hide all the Seven Wonders of the Olden World and
never know they were there--or miss them either. Imagine a trail that
winds like a snake and climbs like a goat and soars like a bird, and
finally bores like a worm and is gone.
Imagine a great cloud-shadow cruising along from point to point, growing
smaller and smaller still, until it seems no more than a shifting purple
bruise upon the cheek of a mountain, and then, as you watch it, losing
itself in a tiny rift which at that distance looks like a wrinkle in the
seamed face of an old squaw, but which is probably a huge gash gored
into the solid rock for a thousand feet of depth and more than a
thousand feet of width.
Imagine, way down there at the bottom, a stream visible only at certain
favored points because of the mighty intervening ribs and chines of
rock--a stream that appears to you as a torpidly crawling yellow worm,
its wrinkling back spangled with tarnished white specks, but which is
really a wide, deep, brawling, rushing river--the Colorado--full of
torrents and rapids; and those white specks you see are the tops of
enormous rocks in its bed.
Imagine--if it be winter--snowdrifts above, with desert flowers blooming
alongside the drifts, and down below great stretches of green verdure;
imagine two or three separate snowstorms visibly raging at different
points, with clear, bright stretches of distance intervening between
them, and nearer maybe a splendid rainbow arching downward into the
great void; for these meteorological three-ring circuses are not
uncommon at certain seasons.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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