It is very possible. Nor does he know how--or when--he shall depart. The past is effaced, and the future recedes into some unformulated atmosphere. Life, a thousand lifetimes, concentrate themselves in the present. A supreme experience has always this peculiarity,--that it bars out all the past and all the future. When one is on the Mount of Transfiguration, he is not scrutinizing the pathway by which he came nor that by which he may descend.
Even if one has seen the Grand Cañon before, he is surprised to find how absolutely newly created it is to him when its haunting magic draws him back. No enshrined memory can compare with the reality. In seeing the Petrified Forest one checks it off as a thing accomplished for life. It is definite. The great logs of agate and jasper and chalcedony lie on the ground as they have lain for perhaps thousands of ages. It is a wonder--the seventh wonder of the world, if one pleases and--the paradise of geologists, but it is unchanging. Not so the Grand Cañon. The cañon is a perpetual transformation scene. Its color effects rival those of an electric fountain under the full play of the spectroscope. It is rose, purple, amber, emerald, pearl gray, pale blue, scarlet--according to atmospheric states. One leaves it in the late afternoon with the rocky towers and pinnacles and battlements all in glowing scarlet, seen through a transparent air. He steps out upon the broad hotel piazzas an hour later and, behold, the uncalculated spaces of the cañon are filled with a half-transparent blue mist which envelops all the curious sandstone formations that gleam in pale rose and opal tints through this thin blue mist, and assume wraith-like shapes. Major Powell well said, that really to see the Grand Cañon, a year is necessary. Yet just as truly may it be said that even for two days it is worth crossing the continent to enjoy this most marvellous of spectacles. Only the scientist and the specialist dream of seeing it in anything like completeness. For the tourist and traveller a range of twenty miles is quite sufficient to disclose its representative beauty. A day's drive by the stage to Grandview Point, Hance's Trail, and Moran's Point is easily made between nine and five o'clock. A drive of two or three miles in the opposite direction will include Rowe's and O'Neil's points. One day will allow the adventurous tourist to "go down the trail." Still, after doing all these things, the best of all, it may be, is to live into the atmosphere. To draw one's chair out on the broad balcony of the new and beautiful hotel, El Tovar, and sit and dream and gaze and wonder, and wonder and gaze and dream, is, perhaps, the greatest joy one can have in all the time passed here, especially if the solitude can be the solitude _à deux_. No joy, no interest, is of much consequence until or unless it is sympathetically shared. As a _décor de scène_ the Grand Cañon is unrivalled. The magic and mystery of all the universe broods over its Titanic spaces.