THE RECEPTION TO THE PLENIPOTENTIARIES AT THE PORTSMOUTH TOWN HALL The Russian Envoys entering their automobile

Photographet for The Outlook by Arthur Hewitt

THE ENCHANTED MESA

T

HERE are some occasions in life when one realizes the inadequacy of words in expressing feelings those unhappily familiar occasions, for instance, when one runs against an unforeseen obstruction in the dark, or smites thumb instead of elusive nail, or misses his train by some fatuous inadvertence after waiting around the station for it for an hour. These infelicities produce a sensation of fullness in the throat which refuses to be relieved by any words to be found in polite vocabularies. Something akin to this. perhaps, is the sensation we experience in viewing a stupendous natural wonder that comes upon us suddenly and unexpectedly for the first time. Only here there is a feeling of emptiness as if the lungs were exhausted and the vocal organs paralyzed. One "catches one's breath," and only later begins to breathe freely and emit the customary vocal sounds that enable us to share our impressions with our friends. To produce this effect on the Spectator, of course, requires something out of the ordinary. His readers know that he is a variously experienced person, and, like Montezuma's courtiers, not easily surprised. But he will admit that he stood silent

and speechless for several seconds when recently for the first time he saw in its full sublimity the Grand Cañon. The Grand Cañon of Arizona, if the reader please. If one speaks of "the Grand Cañon of the Colorado," he finds that many people think he has been sojourning in the vicinity of Pike's Peak or Denver. Colorado has enough to be proud of; let the one and only Grand Cañon be known as the Grand Cañon of Arizona, and the reader's or tourist's fancy will not be led a thousand miles astray.

The Spectator did not see any tears shed or hear any extravagant expressions as he and his companions stood gazing into this tremendous cleft in the earth's surface. Like stout Cortez on his peak in Darien, they stood silent. This was only the echo, so to speak, of the vast silence around them, a silence that could almost be felt welling up from those fathomless depths, those vast spaces filled with gigantic castles and temples, those mysterious shadowy gulches and crevasses, in the strange, weirdly radiant light of an Arizona sunset. And that silence, the Spectator hastens to add, he