Some of us aboard that train did not seem to care deeply for the desert; the cactus possibly disappointed others; and the mesquit failed to give general satisfaction, though at a conservative estimate we passed through nine million miles of it. A few of the delegates from the Eastern seaboard appeared to be irked by the tribal dancing of the Hopi Indians, for there was not a turkey-trotter in the bunch, the Indian settlements of Arizona being the only terpsichorean centers in this country to which the Young Turk movement had not penetrated yet. Some objected to the plains because they were so flat and plainlike, and some to the mountains because of their exceedingly mountainous aspect; but on one point we all agreedon the uniform excellence of the dining-car service.
It is a powerfully hard thing for a man to project his personality across the grave. In making their wills and providing for the carrying on of their pet enterprises a number of our richest men have endeavored from time to time to disprove this; but, to date, the percentage of successes has not been large. So far as most of us are concerned the burden of proof shows that in this regard we are one with the famous little dog whose name was Roverwhen we die, we die all over. Every big success represents the personality of a living man; rarely ever does it represent the personality of a dead man.
The original Fred Harvey is deadhas been dead, in fact, for several years; but his spirit goes marching on across the southwestern half of this country. Two thousand miles from salt water, the oysters that are served on his dining cars do not seem to be suffering from car-sickness. And you can get a beefsteak measuring eighteen inches from tip to tip. There are spring chickens with the most magnificent bust development I ever saw outside of a burlesque show; and the eggs taste as though they might have originated with a hen instead of a cold-storage vault. If there was only a cabaret show going up and down the middle of the car during meals, even the New York passengers would be satisfied with the service, I think.
There is another detail of the Harvey system that makes you wonder. Out on the desert, in a dead-gray expanse of silence and sagebrush, your train halts at a junction point that you never even heard of before. There is not much to be seena depot, a 'dobe cabin or so, a few frame shacks, a few natives, a few Indians and a few incurably languid Mexicansand that is positively all there is except that, right out there in the middle of nowhere, stands a hotel big enough and handsome enough for Chicago or New York, built in the Spanish style, with wide patios and pergolaswhere a hundred persons might perg at one timeand gay-striped awnings. It is flanked by flower-beds and refreshingly green strips of lawn, with spouting fountains scattered about.
You go inside to a big, spotlessly bright dining room and get as good a meal as you can get anywhere on earthand served in as good style, too. To the man fresh from the East, such an establishment reminds him vividly of the hurry-up railroad lunch places to which he has been accustomed back homeplaces where the doughnuts are dornicks and the pickles are fossils, and the hard-boiled egg got up out of a sick bed to be there, and on the pallid yellow surface of the official pie a couple of hundred flies are enacting Custard's Last Stand. It reminds him of them because it is so different. Between Kansas City and the Coast there are a dozen or more of these hotels scattered along the line.
And so, with real food to stay you and one of Tuskegee's bright, straw-colored graduates to minister to your wants in the sleeper, you come on the morning of the third day to the Grand Cañon in northern Arizona; you take one lookand instantly you lose all your former standards of comparison. You stand there gazing down the raw, red gullet of that great gosh-awful gorge, and you feel your self-importance shriveling up to nothing inside of you. You haven't an adjective left to your back. It makes you realize what the sensations would be of one little microbe lost inside of Barnum's fat lady.
I think my preconceived conception of the Cañon was the same conception most people have before they come to see it for themselvesa straight up-and-down slit in the earth, fabulously steep and fabulously deep; nevertheless merely a slit. It is no such thing.
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 rangethe most wonderful mountain range in the worldplanted 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 peakshundreds upon hundreds of themrising 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 shapestabernacles, pyramids, battleships, obelisks, Moorish palacesthe Moorish suggestion is especially pronounced both in colorings and in shapesmonuments, 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 cañons, 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 thereor 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 rocka 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 riverthe Coloradofull of torrents and rapids; and those white specks you see are the tops of enormous rocks in its bed.
Imagineif it be wintersnowdrifts 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.
Imagine all this spread out beneath the unflawed turquoise of the Arizona sky and washed in the liquid gold of the Arizona sunshineand if you imagine hard enough and keep it up long enough you may begin, in the course of eight or ten years, to have a faint, a very faint and shadowy conception of this spot where the shamed scheme of creation is turned upside down and the very womb of the world is laid bare before our impious eyes. Then go to Arizona and see it all for yourself, and you will realize what an entirely inadequate and deficient thing the human imagination is.