The learned of the world, the poets, the painters and the writers have lingered on this same rim, not for a day, but for weeks, charmed, fascinated, bewildered, enthralled, but without being able to reproduce either in colors or in words what they saw. Each one has picked up a bit of color, where there are oceans of color. The scientist knows that through countless ages the waters of the Colorado River have cut this gorge into the earth, through the solid rock and the drifting sand alike. It is a mile deep, thirteen miles from rim to rim and over two hundred miles long. At the bottom of the gorge flows the creator of this wonderful masterpiece of nature, the Colorado River. It is a dashing, roaring river, maddened in its fury to get to the level of the ocean, through unnumbered obstructions, but of all the fury with which it lashes its sides, there is not a murmur that reaches you standing at the rim of the canyon--the river is a mile below you and six miles away. The deathlike stillness of dead ages hangs over the canyon. Before Christ was, before Adam was, this work was completed. Still a mighty river, in those primeval days the Colorado must have been infinitely mightier to have removed the mountains that stood in its course. To wear away the solid stone, disintegrate it and, in solution, to carry it with its own waters to the ocean, that was the work that the Colorado River had to perform to make this bed for itself. In the Mojave desert the thought came to us, how precious is water, the life of the world; here the thought comes to us, how mighty are the waters when they are assembled together, the might of the world. There glistening in the rainbow above the barren mountain peaks; here roaring in their fury, dark and mirky and foreboding at the bottom of the gorge.