Colin
Fletcher called it the “soft, luminous light of a desert crevasse.” I found it
to be a luminous Chasm painted in a fusion of pastel hues of blue, lavender,
pink, yellow, and orange. Even looking at the canyon from afar, safely away
from the rim, my eyes could not fix on any magical feature and my head was
spinning in vertigo that continued even after I closed my eyes.
From the lip
of the South rim, the depth, the distances, the sharpness of the sculpted and
dangerous rocks were dizzying – cliffs, buttes, terraces, boulders hanging by a
thread suspended in the air, hidden crevasses, hidden fatal cracks in what
appears as a solid boulder, swirling dust picked up by the updraft currents, the
suffocatingly hot temperatures going down, and the rain of rocks dislodged
accidentally by the occasional hiker making his/her way down.
The Void is carved
randomly through the rocky plateau of northern Arizona, more than 277 miles
long and over a mile deep in the center. Its width is ten miles in some places,
21 miles via a well-beaten trail, and in others, thirty, and even forty miles wide
depending on where and how one hikes across.
The silence of
the canyon in day time is like a silent movie from long ago and at night it
becomes dark silence that swallows even the sound of the drumming of rain.
Utter
silence, seldom punctuated by the screeching sound of an occasional bird flying
above, dominated this colossal amalgamation of rocks, allegedly cut through by
the Colorado River. Watching the random lacy shapes, I could not help but think
of Noah’s flood when perhaps this massive canyon, a dangerous and massive
Wonder of the Natural World, was under water.
I could feel
with every fiber of my being the utter silence of the Grand Canyon affecting
all my senses with its primordial rocky loudness.
No comments:
Post a Comment