The Boy With the U. S. Survey Part 9

When he arrived at the hotel, Roger walked straight to the desk.

"Is Mr. Ma.s.seth here?" he asked the clerk.

The latter, a being largely characterized by shirt front, gestured the boy to a slightly built man, sitting in the rotunda of the hotel reading a newspaper with an intensity of concentration which Roger immediately conceived to be typical of the man. He turned instantly at the boy's approach, however.

"Mr. Ma.s.seth?" queried the lad.

The reader rose with a quick though courteous motion of a.s.sent.

"I was told to give this letter to you," the boy continued. "I understand it contains my instructions to report to you. My name is Roger Doughty."

"I am extremely pleased," said the older man with a slight foreign timbre in his voice, "to be able to welcome you. I felt a.s.sured, from what Mr. Herold said when he wrote to me, that you would be here to-day, as he suggested that I should find you punctual. It is of the greatest service never to lose a minute, unless indeed, it be taken for a rest."

"I don't want to lose minutes, I want to make the most of them, and Mr.

Field told me that I should never be losing any time as long as I was with you."

"In that case," replied the boy's new leader, with a quick smile, "what would you like to do now? You have never seen the Grand Canyon before?"

"Never!"

"And you are anxious to do so, of course?"

"You bet!" answered Roger. Then, with a laugh, "I pretty nearly mutinied on my first day; I came near going over with the tourists instead of coming here to report."

"I am quite glad that you did not," said the topographer, "for I should like to be with you the first time you see the Canyon in order to be able to tell you what it all means and how it came about. You would probably try to guess at the reason of things and you would guess wrong, and a false first impression is a bad thing, because it is so hard to take out afterward."

"I'd very much rather find out right at first," answered the boy.

"Very well, then, suppose we walk to a near-by point, where an unusually good view of the Canyon can be observed."

Taking up his hat, as he spoke, he waited while the boy arranged for his grip to be taken to his room, and then without further parley started toward the brink of the chasm with quick, nervous strides which taxed Roger's walking powers to the utmost. They walked on to the rounded hill, Roger so full of excitement that he could hardly answer his companion's questions about his former work on the Survey, and just as they were about to cross the summit of the slope, Ma.s.seth touched him on the arm, holding him back.

"Wait just a moment," he said. "Look back over the country and tell me what you see."

Roger turned. "I don't see very much," he said. "I think it's pretty flat except for a range of hills to the east, away off, and that to the south the ground seems to be falling away."

"Is the fall long?"

"I hadn't thought of that," said the boy, "but I suppose we must be quite high up, for the road has been on a gradual incline for miles and miles."

Ma.s.seth took a few steps onward.

"You noticed," he said, "how gradual that slope was. Now," pausing as they crossed the ridge, "this is not so gradual." He smiled at the boy's speechless wonderment.

Roger found himself standing not three yards away from a drop of 6,800 feet, the first couple of thousand sheer almost immediately below him.

So near that he could have leaped to it, rose a fantastic pinnacle, elaborately carved, springing from a base 1,200 feet below. Beyond this, seamed and jagged, thrown across this cloven chasm as though in defiance of any natural supposing, flung a blood-red escarpment, taking the breath away by the very audacity of its reckless scenic emphasis.

Further, again, in unsoftened splashes and belts of naked color, mesa and plateau, peak and crag, shouldering b.u.t.te and towering barrier, through a vista of miles seeming to stretch to the very world's end, impelled a breathless awe.

And, in t.i.tanic mockery of pygmy human work, the glowing rocks appeared grotesquely, yet powerfully scornful of the greatest buildings of mankind. Minaret and spire, minster and dome, facade and campanile, stood guard over the riven precipices, and not to be outdone by man, nature had there erected temple and coliseum, pyramid and vast cathedral, castle and thrice-walled fastness, until it seemed to the boy that there was thrown before his eyes a hysterical riot of every dream and nightmare of architecture that the world had ever conceived.

"But--but, I never thought it was anything like this!" exclaimed Roger.

The older man repressed a smile at the triteness of the speech, which is that usually educed from every new beholder of the scene.

"What do you think of it?" he said.

"It doesn't seem real," answered the boy. "It's like the places you see in your dreams that you know can't be so, and what's more, it's like one of those places all set on fire with flames of different colors."

[Ill.u.s.tration: GRAND CANYON OF THE COLORADO.

Showing the nature of the apparently impossible obstacles found in traversing it.

_Photograph by U.S.G.S._]

The topographer nodded.

"But what you will find still more strange," he said, "is that it is never twice the same. If you move a few yards away"--he suited the action to the word--"it looks quite different, and even if you stay still, under the changing light new shapes appear."

"That's right," affirmed the boy. "From where we stood before, I could see a huge fortress, only it was a vivid purple, and now it's gone. And I suppose those really aren't richly carved churches over there,"

pointing with his finger, "but a fellow would bet that they were."

"Churches without any congregations, and whose only preacher is the thunder, but they do look like temples and are so named. But truly they have been carved, though not by human hands."

"By what, then?" asked the boy.

"By wind and water," was the reply, "which have made and unmade many a thousand square mile of the earth's surface. If you will notice," he went on, "jagged and pointed as those peaks are, from this side clear across to the other, not one of them rises above the level on which you are standing or rather, above the level of the opposite side of the Canyon, which is a little higher, the slope being continued across. So, you see, you must not think of these like mountains as being built up, but of gorges as being cut down."

"And has the river cut it all down?"

"The river started it, and then of course every little stream helps, and indeed, every rain adds another fissure to the carving."

"But what makes such curious shapes?" asked the boy, still considerably puzzled.

"The relative hardness of the different kinds of rock," was the reply.

"Not to seem too technical, the top stratum, that is to say the rock immediately under the soil of this plateau, while quite hard, is very thin, and underneath it are various other layers of rock, some fairly hard and others very soft. The Colorado River has a very swift current, and once it had cut through the hard rock on the top it quickly ate its way downward through the soft limestones and sandstones below. But some strata were quite hard and these, resisting the water, formed the terraces which you see on every hand."

"But I still don't understand," said the boy, "what it is that gives them such curious shapes. I can see how a hard rock would make a terrace, but why aren't the lines all regular?"

"Just because it has been done by water. Sandstone, you know, is made of sand, pressed, and sand is all sorts of rocks ground down fine. So every handful of sand may contain particles of a dozen different kinds of rock, and if there was any difference in the hardness of the rock of which the sandstone was made, or any difference in the pressure while it was being made, each difference would show up by its greater or less resistance to the action of wind and water. So, you see this bit is hard and cuts slowly, that bit soft, and cuts rapidly, giving a carved effect."

"But if it all follows a regular rule, why does it look so unnatural?"

"That is easy," replied his informant. "The strata are regular--that is what makes the ma.s.ses look like buildings done by hand, there is a sense of proportion, but they look unnatural because the ground plan is capricious, the water having found its way to the bottom of its thousand canyons by the irregular and complicated way of least resistance."

"And the colors seem so glaring and so strange!"