OCR Text |
Show GRAND CANYON OF THE UREQUI Matchless Scenery of the Sierras Thomas Moran's Historic Painting Rush of Volcanic Magma Battle of the Elements Ele-ments Valley of the Churches The Phenomenon Explained An Uncanny Region A Graphic and Wonderful Description. De-scription. To describe the stupendous mountain land- i scape of the Gran Barranca itself transcends tho I possibilities of language. The grandeur of tin panorama and the massiveness overwhelm you, and ! though the mind expands with the genius of thj place, yet piecemeal you must break to separaiu contemplation the might and majesty of the great; whole. Only bo so doing may the soul absorb tin elemental glory of the matchless scene. The greatest of American scenic painters, Thomas Moran, roamed for three months througa the Grand Canyon of Arizona, making sketches of: the strange formations, catching, as best he could, the play of light and shade and the glory of thu sunsets when the heavens were bathed in chromatid light, lie went home and finished his 1'amou painting. paint-ing. "The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River." ' ! His canvas was hung in the capitol at Washington I the highest recognition of his genius his coun- try could confer upon him yet Moran proclaimed j that it was impossible for man to paint the splen- J dor of the canyon when the heavens, at times, are j turned to blood. , j RUSH OF. " VOLCANIC MAGMA. ;j said, toward the end of inr last correspond- ' f J ence, that hn porphyritic mountains still bear thj f . j'-oiitrkij -"trftiM'9.i. warr of xautiwounds openc.L. ' in the Titanic combats of past days.r ihe- ? the deep ravines, the narrow fissures a-.d 'sr ..ugiv-.' j openings left when the mountains were wedgi-d asunder, or when torrential storms broke upon thu j great hills and forming into rivers, tore their way , to the lowlands. ' .' ? In those remote times, gases of enormous pow- '.. I er of expansion were imprisoned in the wombs of ' . j these mountains, then air and water entered, tho I gases became combustible and were converted into ; actual flames, till the rocks melted and the metals ? changed to vapors and the vapors liquified and, ex- I panding in their fierce wrath, burst asunder the ' I walls of their mountain prison and fought their way to freedom. Then, amid the roar of escaping j steam, the gleam of lightning and the crash off f thunder, the molten mass in riotous exultation rushed down tne body of the monstrous hill, hissing like a thing alive and flooding the land with fire j and smoke. Some awful cataclyism such as thij f must have occurred in the time and in the land , of the patriarchs, in the days when Isaiah epoke ti ; God reminding him of the past, "When thou didst; J terrible things, which we looked not for. Thou I earnest down and the mountains flowed down at thy j presence.' AIR OF GREAT AXTIQUITY. But the dominating feature of the terrifying scene was not so much its trancendent majesty and isolation as' its air of great antiquity. Turning and looki .iir up I saw a vast structure of adamant, of black gnessoid, shale and shist, traversed by dykes of granite that were old when the waters vi the great deep submerged the domes of the highcsS mountains. Gazing upon these mighty hills, hoary with age, I asked aloud the portentous question of Solomon: "Is there anything of which it may ho said, see, this is new: it hath already been of old time which was before us f The measuring capacity ca-pacity of the mind is unequal to the demands rc such magnitudes, for there is here no standard adjustable ad-justable to the mind; perspectives hi-p illusive. di-tauces di-tauces are deceptive for yonder cliff charges iH color, shape and size as clouds of greater or lesse? density approach it. It seems near, almost unto touch, yet the finger-stone which you throw toward it falls almost at your feet, for the cliff is full two miles beyond you. From the floor of the canyon to the summit of yonder hill is twelve time the height of the tallest monument in America. To acquirn a sense of intimacy with this Barranca, a mental grasp of detail and a perception of its immensity, you must descend the sides of the granite rock which walls the aAvful depths. To the man wh possesses the gift of appreciation of the terrific iu nature, the prospect is a scene of surpassing splendor. splen-dor. The panorama is never the same, although (Continued on Fagc .) g 1 ' I 1 I , GRAND CANYON OF THE UREQUI. j (Continued from Page 1.) you think you have examined every peak and escapement. es-capement. As the angle of sunlight changes there begins a ghostly procession of colossal forms from the further fur-ther -side, and the trees around you are silhoueted against the rocks, and the rocck3 themselves grow in bulk and stature. A PLACE OF AWE AND REVERENCE. Down toward the lowlands I saw things, as if alive, raise. themselves on the foothills. These are the giant Suaharos, the Candelabrum cacti and beside be-side them was the yucca, a bread tree of the south, whose cream white flowers shone across the snake like shadows, of .the strange cacti. The sepulchral quiet of the place, the consciousness of the unnumbered unnum-bered ages past since time had hoared those hills and the absence of life and motion filled me with sensations of awe and reverence. When darkness shrouds this region and storms ; of thunder and lightning sweep across it, penetrating penetrat-ing the cavernous depths of the great gorge, and revealing the desolation and frightful solitude of the land, it would be a fit abode for the demons of Dante or the Djins of the southern mountains of whom the woods in other days told terrible tales. Xo man, after his sensations of awe have vanished and his sense of the sublime in nature is satisfied, may continue to gaze upon the scene around him, and yet admit that his njind has done justice to the magnificence and glory of this panorama of one of the supremest of earth's wonders. To absorb ab-sorb its splendor the mind must become familiar with the genius of the place, recognize the influence in-fluence of the winds and storms on the softer material, ma-terial, perceive the variations of colors, forms and . trees, till, expanding with the spirit of the mountain, moun-tain, the soul itself has grown colossal or Till, growing with its growth, we' thus dilate j Our spirits to the size, of that we contemplate. VALUE OF THE CHURCHES. With my. Mayo guide I camped that night on the granite platform high up on the Gran Barranca. Bar-ranca. We saw the sun descend behind the great hills, the fleecy clouds, suspended and stationary, take on the colors of the solar spectrum, the stars coming out, and then at one stride came the night. Early next morning we began the descent to the Valley of the Churches, lhe path was narrow and steep, around rocks honeycombed with water or eaten into by zoophites. It twisted here and there, through precipitous defiles, where the jagged spurs and salient angles of the huge cliffs shoved it dangerously dan-gerously near the rim of the precipice. We continued con-tinued to descend, our path winding around rocky projections,-across arroyos formed by running waters wa-ters in the rainy season, skirting the danger line of the abysses, till early in the afternoon when we tn-texed tn-texed the mesa or table land, where, in a huge basin ba-sin reposes "La Arroyo de las Iglesias" the vale of the- churches. It is a labrynth of architectural forms, endlessly varied in design, ajid at times painted in every color known to the palette, in pure transparent tones of marvelous delicacy a shifting diorama of colors advancing into crys-taline. crys-taline. clearness or disappearing'behind slumberous haze. The foliage had assumed the brilliant colors of summer, and, from, the mesa, midway between the mountains and the valley of the Urique, the season was marking, on a brilliant chromatic scale, the successive zones of vegetation as they rose in Tegular Tegu-lar gradations from the tropic floor. The atmos phere had the crystaline transparency which be- longs to mountain air, and through it the scenery assumed a vividness of color and grandeur of out- I lino which imparted to the mind a sense of exal-tation exal-tation ' "Tii.1 the dilating soul, enwrap t, transfused Into the mighty vision passing there As in. her natural form,-swelled vast to heaven." The appearance instantaneously disclosed was that of an abandoned city, a wilderness of ruined buildings left standing in an endles3 solitude. It was a phantom city within which a human voice was never heard, where coyotes and foxes starved and where sccorpions, tarantulas and horned toads increased and: multiplied. The land around was broken into terraces, and looked like a city wrecked by the Goths and long ago abandoned. For herBwas forest of cathedral spires, oi towere, great arclies.and architraves, battlements, bat-tlements, buttresses and flying buttresses, dismantled disman-tled buildings and wondrous domes. There are times, as the sun is declining when these domes and cathedral towers glow 'with sheen of burnished gold orrreposB 'neath a coloring of soft-purple or a mantle of fiery -vermilllon. BIRTH OF STA13E.T0JIMATI0XS. And how did these weird and ghostly monuments monu-ments originate, who raised them in this wilderness wilder-ness and when were their foundations laid? " ' Hero is the story as it was toldto mc. When a mass or body of air becomes Tery warm jrom the direct rays of a blazing sun or by contact with the hot sand of a great iilane, it looses -moisture and rapidly ascerds to higher regions in the heavens; then other and much colder air from the aea or surrounding land Tushes in to 11 the Toid, and as this new atmosphexic sea rolls its great waves into I tlie stupendous space partially left vacant by the disappearing hot air, sand and grit are taken up and, with -violent force send Telocity , carried against a projecting cliff of soft matexiaL separating it from the parent body, eg? again a great sandstone hfll may stand solitary and alone or he jnxrroandecl by hills of lesser height and inagrdtudc. Then, .year aft er year and centnry after century, these sand ' blasts cut a little here and a little - there, till in time these pectraLforms stand alone,' and at a distance dis-tance resemble in their'isolation the ruins of a long 1 deserted city. . This vast amphitheatre, with its great forest of 1 monuments and weird structures, surrounded by 1 volcanic cones and walled in by towering moun-. 1 tains is a part of the great Barranca. You now perceive that you are in a region of many canyons, and that the whole face of the country is covered ' with wounds and welts, and with sharply outlined and lofty hills of gneiss and quartzite springing 1 from the floor of the valley.- Beyond contradiction, 1 earthquakes and volcanoes at one time shook this place with violence. Only by the aid of an airship air-ship may the Gran Barranca be seen in its- majestic entirety, for much of it lies buried in the vast and gloomy abyss through which the silent river flows and to which direct descent is impossible. Ilermqsillo, July .4.' |