"The Fairest enchants me, The Mighty commands me."
In this most sublime of all earthly spectacles there are aërial landscape effects as delicate and evanescent as a cloud-wreath, or as a fog that advances, wraith-like, to melt away into dissolving views. "The region is full of wonders and beauties and sublimities that Shelley's imaginings do not match in the 'Prometheous Unbound,'" wrote Charles Dudley Warner.
If the world realized the marvellous effects of this very Carnival of the Gods, the infinite spaces of the Grand Cañon itself could not contain all who would eagerly throng to behold it. The statistical record of the increase of visitors is rather interesting. In 1900 there were eight hundred and thirteen; the succeeding year, six thousand eight hundred and eighty-three; while in 1903 the number increased to nearly one hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Since that date the number of visitors has multiplied itself after the fashion of compound interest. The establishment of all the conveniences and comforts, not to say luxuries, of modern travel may be one of the most potent factors in this increase of visitors. Until within five years the Grand Cañon could only be reached by a stage ride of seventy miles through the Coconino Forest,--whose dim gray twilight reminds one of the forests of Fontainebleau,--and which drive, however romantically beautiful, was attended with too great terrestrial discomfort to commend it to general public service. Until 1906 the hotel accommodations, also, while offering a modest comfort, were essentially primitive; while now the superb new Harvey hostelry, "El Tovar," built at a cost of a quarter of a million dollars (and the Harvey name is a synonym in the West for everything admirable in dining cars, refreshment stands, and hotels), insures to every traveller any degree of luxurious comfort he requires. Even the man who, after visiting all the enchanted points in the Land of Enchantment, in its prehistoric period of twenty years ago before Pullman cars climbed the mountain peaks and the Waldorf-Astoria type of hotels sprang up, the man who, after a trip through these wonders of the world, returned to New York and declared that he would rather see an electric bell and a bath than all the grandeur between Pike's Peak and the Pacific, would now be fully reconciled to Western sojourns. He would find his electric bell and his bath to be as much a matter of course as in Fifth Avenue, besides also finding that there were spectacles,--as that of the Garden of the Gods, Cheyenne Cañon, the Petrified Forests, the Grand Cañon, and the Los Angeles electric trolley system (which quite deserves to rank with the modern "Seven Wonders" of the world), and which Fifth Avenue by no means provided for her votaries. In fact, "El Tovar" is so inclusive of comfort as to be fairly a feature of the cañon, commanding, on one side, a magnificence of prospect without parallel in the world in the mighty chasm on whose brink it stands, on the other side the fragrant Coconino pine forest,--the largest belt of pine timber in the United States, and which has been made a government forest reservation.