But it is an error to think of great canyons as mere slits in the ground, dark and gloomy, like a deep well from whose depths stars may be sighted at midday.

Minor canyons sometimes approach this character, as, for example, the canyon of the upper Virgen, called Parunuweap, fifteen hundred feet deep and no more than twenty to thirty feet wide, with vertical walls, but I have never been in a canyon from which stars were visible in daylight, nor have I ever known anyone who had.

The light is about the same as that at the bottom of a narrow street flanked by very high buildings.

The walls may sometimes be gloomy from their colour, or may seem so from the circumstances under which one views them, but aside from the fact that any deep, shut-in valley or canyon may become oppressive, there is nothing specially gloomy about a deep canyon.

The sun usually falls more or less in every canyon, no matter how narrow or deep.