The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon Read Online Free PDF Page B

penetrated only a fraction of the way down before further descent became impossible—although they had gone far enough to confirm that the Hopi had not overstated the size of the river. But what sobered the reconnaissance party even more were the monstrous dimensions of the interior—a landscape so huge that even its minor features had made them feel hopelessly diminished. To illustrate the point, Melgosa pointed to a single stone column. From the rim, it appeared to be roughly the height of a man, did it not? But no. In fact, it had proved taller than the great tower of Seville, the belfry that rose 344 feet from the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede, the largest cathedral in the world and, tellingly, a crowning point of reference for a Spaniard of that era. They must have felt that they had lost their bearings entirely.
    In both a literal and a symbolic sense, this was entirely true. Without a single familiar object to impart some sense of scale—a man sitting beneath the shade of a tree; an ox pulling a plow through a field—it was impossible for the Spaniards to gauge the immensity of this declivity. They had no conception that they were staring into an abyss whose volume exceeded a thousand cubic miles, a distance and depth that dwarfed anything they or any other European had ever encountered. They had no notion that, for much of its length, the top and the bottom of this canyon were separated by more than a vertical mile of rock, which meant that if it had somehow been possible to lift up every peak in the Pyrenees and drop them neatly into that expanse, each mountain would easily fit inside the bottom and not a single summit would peer above the rim.They also had no way of fathoming that, from its eastern reaches to its western terminus, the abyss ran for 277 miles, arguably the longest canyon on earth. Nor did they comprehend that the span between the South Rim and the North Rim averaged roughly ten miles, or that the canyon’s six hundred bays and tributary arroyos could push that width back to fifteen, twenty, even thirty miles. Finally, they were unable to grasp or appreciate that the river of which the Hopi spoke served as the premier drainage channel for the entire Southwest, a waterway that gathered together all the runoff of a region larger than Spain and Portugal combined.
    Their inability to frame themselves in relation to this stupendous tableau, however, was not simply spatial but also extended into a fourth dimension, the realm of time. And here, they were truly out of their depth. They had no idea, for example, that the very rock beneath their feet, a honey-colored limestone known as the Kaibab, was older than the oldest things they knew of. Older than the basilica that was built upon the slope of Vatican Hill in Rome or the shrine in Jerusalem where the Prophet Muhammad had initiated his ascent to heaven. Older than the temples of ancient Greece or the walled cities of Sumeria—older than any city in the world, in fact, or even the land itself. So old thatthe Kaibab actually predated not only the continent on which they stood but also the ocean they had spent nearly three months sailing across to get there, as well as all the rest of the continents and all of the oceans between them. And as astonishing as all of that may have seemed, what would have brought them to their knees in awe was that this topmost layer of rock wasn’t really very old at all in comparison with the age of what was lost in the tremulous shadows below.
    They could see that the walls of the canyon formed a crumbling staircase, but they had no way of knowing that each riser on those stairs was composed of rocks that had been deposited before the step above and after the step below—a vertical concatenation of time that had been laid down in horizontal strata. I This meant, among other things, that if Cárdenas and his men had elected at that moment to force a descent, they would have confronted not only a formidable physical