Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made Of

Beethoven: Ninth Symphony

Once again, the Grand Canyon was casting its spell, gradually seeping into every cranny of
my consciousness.
The uncertainties of the future, exigencies of the present,
the perplexities of the past become such stuff as dreams are made of. The past is there, yes--but it is the past of long-dead species, the past of vanished seas and of mountains long since crumbled into dust. Nowhere in all this vastness was there a single sign of man, or even a hint that he had ever existed.
Dusk had settled on the river and its bank, and the shadow of oncoming night crept up the far wall. The evening light washed

across the Esplanade to the south and broke against the face of the Canyon's upper cliff. Their details now appeared in sharp focus. Brightly lit capes contrasted with shadowed bays, and twenty miles to the east Sinyala Butte, which had been almost undistinguishable in the flat afternoon light, now stood boldly detached.
The wind was dying down, and in the hush time itself seemed to have paused. The whole vast scene was utterly serene, with that serenity peculiar to the greater work of nature. This quality I found hard to define. The vastness of the scale may have contributed to it.
The harmony of the colors--

the gold-streaked blue of the evening sky, the purple of the shadows, the reds and yellows of cliff and rock, the muted greens of the semi-desert plants--was doubtless part of it too. So was the loneliness, and the silence--a silence disturbed only by a faint murmur from the river, the voice of a rapid exhausted by the distance.
But mostly, I thought, it was the rightness of it all. There was nothing haphazard, nothing obtrusive or out of place in this landscape. It had contrasts, but no conflict; diversity without chaos.

Mere chance had not dictated
the shape of these great cliffs,
nor had the river which had cut them set a capricious course.
Obeying a few simple laws,
using a few simple tools,
nature had worked unhurried
through a myriad of yesterdays
and had come up with this.
The result was inevitable,
it was right--and it was sublime. The real miracle of the Grand Canyon was that nature had needed no miracles in its making.
The sun was setting now, over the shoulder of Vulcan's Throne. As I took a last long look at the river, the lines of Edith Warner echoed in my mind:
This is the day when life and the world seem to be standing still--only time and the river flowing past the mesas...
The next time you visit the Grand Canyon, you might find yourself a quiet perch somewhere on the rim. Look off through the blue cast of space at the cliffs and terraces and amphitheaters and temples, search out the thin thread of the Colorado, rumbling through the gorge it has cut into the antiquities of the world, and breathe in your part of it all. It is within your power--and of those you can awaken--to make certain that this will endure.
--Francois Leydet
from Alone at Toroweap