Antelope Canyon is a sandstone slot on Navajo land in northern Arizona, narrow enough that the walls almost touch overhead and daylight reaches the floor as a single shaft at midday. The rock is folded and curved like poured water, because poured water is what made it. There are two sections. Upper Antelope, Tsé bighánílíní — the place where water runs through rocks — is a flat corridor at ground level, and it is where the beam comes down. On clear days in high summer, for a few minutes around midday, the sun climbs high enough to drop a shaft to the floor, and it stands in the dusty air like a pillar. Either side of it the walls do the work: the same curve drifts from orange to crimson to purple as you move under it.
Lower Antelope, Hazdistazí, spiral rock arches, is tighter and deeper. You go down steep flights of bolted steel stairs into a passage walked in single file, reading it from the floor up, past corkscrew curves and hairline cracks the wider section never shows. At one place, where the walls nearly meet, your guide points up at a window of sky shaped like a heart. Those stairs are not a convenience. They replaced wooden ladders that a flash flood tore out of the slot, and the cargo nets rigged overhead are flood equipment too. The canyon is sacred to the Navajo, and nobody walks it except with their guides, who point out the shapes in the rock and will say what the place means to them if you ask. The English name is an outsider's afterthought, taken from the pronghorn that used to graze the plains nearby. On the August day in 1997, barely any rain fell at the canyon. A thunderstorm eleven kilometres upstream sent a wall of water three and a half metres high down the passage with no warning, eleven visitors drowned, and no one has been allowed in without a Navajo guide since.