All this, which is literally true, is a mere trifle of what might be said in trying to fix a standard of comparison for the Grand Canyon. But I fancy there is no standard adjustable to the human mind. You may compare all you will—eloquently and from wide experience, and at last all similes fail. The Grand Canyon is just the Grand Canyon, and that is all you can say. I never have seen anyone who was prepared for it. I never have seen anyone who could grasp it in a week’s hard exploration; nor anyone, except some rare Philistine, who could even think he had grasped it. I have seen people rave over it; better people struck dumb with it, even strong men who cried over it; but I have never yet seen the man or woman that _expected_ it. It adds seriously to the scientific wonder and the universal impressiveness of this unparalleled chasm that it is not in some stupendous mountain range, but in a vast, arid, lofty floor of nearly 100,000 square miles—as it were, a crack in the upper story of the continent. There is no preparation for it. Unless you had been told, you would no more dream that out yonder amid the pines the flat earth is slashed to its very bowels, than you would expect to find an iceberg in Broadway. With a very ordinary running jump from the spot where you get your first glimpse of the canyon you could go down 2,000 feet without touching. It is sudden as a well. But it is no mere cleft. It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 feet deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. It is like a dissection of the whole cosmogony. And the purple shadows, the dazzling lights, the thunderstorms and snowstorms, the clouds and the rainbows that shift and drift in that vast subterranean arena below your feet! And amid those enchanted towers and castles which the vastness of the scale leads you to call “rocks,” but which are in fact as big above the river-bed as the Rockies from Denver, and bigger than Mount Washington from Fabyan’s or the Glen!