Titan of Chasms. The Grand Canyon of Arizona

Only by descending into the canyon may one arrive at anything like comprehension of its proportions, and the descent can not be too urgently commended to every visitor who is sufficiently robust to bear a reasonable amount of fatigue. There are four paths down the southern wall of the canyon in the granite gorge district -- Mystic Spring, Bright Angel, Berry's and Hance's trails. The following account of a descent of the old Hance trail will serve to indicate the nature of such an experience to-day, except that the trip may now be safely made with greater comfort.

For the first two miles it is a sort of Jacob's ladder, zigzagging at an unrelenting pitch. At the end of two miles a comparatively gentle slope is reached, known as the blue limestone level, some 2,500 feet below the rim, that is to say -- for such figures have to be impressed objectively upon the mind -- five times the height of St. Peter's, the Pyramid of Cheops, or the Strasburg Cathedral; eight times the height of the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty; eleven times the height of Bunker Hill Monument. Looking back from this level the huge picturesque towers that border the rim shrink to pigmies and seem to crown a perpendicular wall, unattainably far in the sky. Yet less than one-half the descent has been made.