The Book of Earth

Let the stars fade. Open the Book of Earth.

Out of the Painted Desert, in broad noon,

Walking through pine-clad bluffs, in an air like wine,

I came to the dreadful brink.

I saw, with a swimming brain, the solid earth

Splitting apart, into two hemispheres,

Cleft, as though by the axe of an angry god.

On the brink of the Grand Canyon,

Over that reeling gulf of amethyst shadows,

From the edge of one sundered hemisphere I looked down,

Down from abyss to abyss,

Into the dreadful heart of the old earth dreaming

Like a slaked furnace of her far beginnings,

The inhuman ages, alien as the moon,

Æons unborn, and the unimagined end.

There, on the terrible brink, against the sky,

I saw a black speck on a boulder jutting

Over a hundred forests that dropped and dropped

Down to a tangle of red precipitous gorges

That dropped again and dropped, endlessly down.

A mile away, or ten, on its jutting rock,

The black speck moved. In that dry diamond light

It seemed so near me that my hand could touch it.

It stirred like a midge, cleaning its wings in the sun.

All measure was lost. It broke—into five black dots.

I looked, through the glass, and saw that these were men.

Beyond them, round them, under them, swam the abyss

Endlessly on.

Far down, as a cloud sailed over,

A sun-shaft struck, between forests and sandstone cliffs,

Down, endlessly down, to the naked and dusky granite,

Crystalline granite that still seemed to glow

With smouldering colours of those buried fires

Which formed it, long ago, in earth’s deep womb.

And there, so far below that not a sound,

Even in that desert air, rose from its bed,

I saw the thin green thread of the Colorado,

The dragon of rivers, dwarfed to a vein of jade,

The Colorado that, out of the Rocky Mountains,

For fifteen hundred miles of glory and thunder,

Rolls to the broad Pacific.

From Flaming Gorge,

Through the Grand Canyon with its monstrous chain

Of subject canyons, the green river flows,

Linking them all together in one vast gulch,

But christening it, at each earth-cleaving turn,

With names like pictures, for six hundred miles:

Black Canyon, where it rushes in opal foam;

Red Canyon, where it sleeks to jade again

And slides through quartz, three thousand feet below;

Split-Mountain Canyon, with its cottonwood trees;

And, opening out of this, Whirlpool Ravine,

Where the wild rapids wash the gleaming walls

With rainbows, for nine miles of mist and fire;

Kingfisher Canyon, gorgeous as the plumes

Of its wingèd denizens, glistening with all hues;

Glen Canyon, where the Cave of Music rang

Long since, with the discoverers’ desert-song;

Vermilion Cliffs, like sunset clouds congealed

To solid crags; the Valley of Surprise

Where blind walls open, into a Titan pass;

Labyrinth Canyon, and the Valley of Echoes;

Cataract Canyon, rolling boulders down

In floods of emerald thunder; Gunnison’s Valley

Crossed, once, by the forgotten Spanish Trail;

Then, for a hundred miles, Desolation Canyon,

Savagely pinnacled, strange as the lost road

Of Death, cleaving a long deserted world;

Gray Canyon next; then Marble Canyon, stained

With iron-rust above, but brightly veined

As Parian, where the wave had sculptured it;

Then deep Still-water.