Charles Fletcher Lummis

“ All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland without a parallel, There are ruins as striking as the storied ones along the Rhine, and far more remarkable, There are peoples as picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural wonders which have no peers whatever. ”

“ Many have come cynically prepared to be disappointed; to find it overdrawn and really not so stupendous as something else. It is, after all, a hard test that so be-bragged a wonder must endure under the critical scrutiny of them that have seen the earth and the fullness thereof. But I never knew the most self-satisfied veteran traveler to be disappointed in the Grand Canyon, or to patronize it. ”

“ As for the Old World, the explorer who shall find a gorge there one-half as great will win undying fame.
The quebrada of the Apu-Rimac is a marvel of the Andes, with its vertiginous depths and its suspension bridge of wild vines. The Grand Canyon of th Arkansas, in Colorado, is a noble little slit in the mountains. The Franconia and White Mountain notches in New Hampshire are beautiful. The Yosemite and the Yellowstone canyons surpass the world, each in its way. ”

“ The Grand Canyon country is not only the hugest, but the most varied and instructive example on earth of one of the chief factors of earth-building—erosion, It is the mesa country—the Land of Tables. Nowhere else on the footstool is there such an example of deep-gnawing water or of water high-carving. ”

“ The largest natural bridge in the world—200 feet high, over 500 feet span, and over 600 feet wide, up and down stream, and with an orchard on its top and miles of stalactite caves under its abutments. ”

“ Noticeably it is most glibly in use with those but lately, and for the first time, wandered beyond their native state or county, and as every province has its own local brag of biggest things, the too credulous tourist will find a superlative everywhere. And superlatives are unsafe without wide horizons of comparison. ”