Wonderland

“ALICE IN WONDERLAND” is a fairy-tale, but there is a real Wonderland out in the West. One of the wonders is a river. It is called the Colorado River, but it is not in the State of Colorado. It is in Arizona.

The river runs deep down in the bottom of the deepest ditch in the World, a ditch a mile deep in places. This ditch is called by the Spaniards a Canyon. You can stand on the edge of the Colorado Canyon and look almost a mile down to what seems a slender little thread of water—the Colorado River—running at the bottom, and yet this little stream has cut this ditch in which it runs—worn it down—all by itself. Here we can see, better than any place., what the World looks like on the inside if we could dig down into it a mile deep, for here a little river has dug down a mile deep for us. I asked my guide how far it was across to the other side of the Canyon.

“Oh,” he replied, “about ten or twelve shouts.” That was a new distance to me, for I didn’t even know how far one shout was. My arithmetic says twelve inches make a foot and three feet make a yard, but does not say how many feet make a “shout.” You can look across to the other side of the Canyon and see the opposite wall almost a mile high—not a plain, blank wall like the wall of a building, but more like the walls of heaven—layers of rock, pile upon pile, colored yellow, red, green, orange, purple, mixed with sunshine and shadow. All of this rock was once under the sea, for it is limestone and sandstone. Each layer has been dyed a different color by minerals like iron and copper; if there was iron in the water, it turned the rock the color of iron rust—red; if copper, it turned the rock green.

I once bought a souvenir pencil. In its end was a pinhole, and when you squinted into the hole with one eye, there you saw in all its vastness the Colorado Canyon. It seemed impossible, and yet there it was, stretching off in the distance, mile upon mile, in a picture the size of a pin head!

Some of the branches of the Colorado run in smaller canyons, and high up on the walls of these canyons are houses built in caves in the rock. Once upon a time, long, long ago, people whom we call “cliff-dwellers” built these homes there to be safe from their enemies.