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creation.
    Had Cárdenas and his men succeeded in completing this odyssey, they would have found themselves suspended so far down inside the pelagic nocturnes of deep time that their connection to everything that was familiar and comforting would have dropped away like a severed umbilical cord. This domain was older and deeper, by far, than anything they could even pretend to imagine—a dimension of time and space where God himself seemed to be a deluded and laughable idea and, in the same instant, closer and more ingrained than the teeth inside one’s own head.

    E lecting to forgo the descent, Cárdenas and his men continued their sojourn along the South Rim, slowly making their way west. During the better part of the following week, they were afforded ample time to absorb the scene before them in all of its glory. There was color everywhere, and as each day unfolded, the leaning light of late autumn would have put the countenance of the canyon through a range of complex and alluring changes.
    The show began early each morning, as the company prepared to resume its journey. Just before dawn, the plateaus stretching beyond the rims took on a pale pink luster, while the upper band of cliffs appeared to be floating on a lake of darkness that slowly compressed as the light poured over the edges and squeezed night out of the abyss. Later in the afternoon, as the light turned flat, the chasm was engorged with a harsh glare that strained eyes and made temples throb. Then, at sunset, the upper strata were once again hammered into a molten gold that gradually cooled to lavender during the twilit minutes before the long shadows returned, the completion of a magnificent burning that spanned the entire visual spectrum, all the named and unnamed hues of candescence.
    If they were moved by such wonders, their response was never recorded, and in any case, aesthetics were irrelevant to the object of their quest. For Cárdenas was chasing after a harder grade of wealth, and the canyon seemed to contain none of it. There were no precious metals or gems to plunder in the name of his king, no farmlands or estates to seize, no inhabitants to enslave and convert.The impossibly distant river offered no great artery of transportation, and if the Hopi were to be believed, the only mineral worth excavating was salt. As for the gilded cities of Cíbola, they were nowhere to be seen.
    And so, at the end of the week, Cárdenas did the only thing that made sense from his perspective. He pointed his squadron in the direction from which they had come and led them back toward the main body of the expedition—which went on to spend the next two years in a search that took them across the Texas Panhandle, through Oklahoma, and deep into the plains of central Kansas. It was the longest and most arduous march conducted by any group of conquistadores in the sixteenth century, and when they finally returned to Mexico in disgrace in the spring of 1542, they brought back, in the pages of their letters and reports, accounts of many singular encounters, including the first prairie dogs, the first jackrabbits,the first meetings with the tribes of the Great Plains, and the first buffalo. But they had failed to find anything that they deemed to be of value.
    “The villages of that province remained peaceful,” the expedition’s chronicler wrote of the country surrounding the great canyon, “since they were never visited again, nor any attempt made to find other peoples in that direction.” It was as if the defining element of the entire continent—the greatest testament on earth to the passage of time and to the power of water—had been rendered invisible.
    More than three hundred years would pass before the most important of Coronado’s successors returned, less than an eyeblink when measured by the scale of Grand Canyon time. But even so, the arrival of those first Spaniards marked a fundamental turning point, a rotation of the great wheel. Because it was