Through Our Unknown Southwest Part 8

As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of gra.s.s grows below the conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour; and there is an all-pervasive odor, not of burning, but of steaming resin, or pine sap heated to evaporation; but it is not hot. The mesa runs up to an alt.i.tude of almost 9,000 feet, with air so light that you feel a buoyant lift to your heart-beats and a clearing of the cobwebs from your brain.

You can lose lots of sleep here and not feel it. All heaviness has gone out of body and soul. In fact, when you come back to lower levels, the air feels thick and hard to breathe. And you can go hard here and not tire, and stand on the crest of mesas that anywhere else would be considered mountains, and wave your arms above the top of the world. So high you are--you did not realize it--that the rim of encircling mountains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge of an inverted blue bowl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona, stands on a mesa high above the plain]

The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line altogether among the sagebrush s.h.i.+mmering in pure light; and you become aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is--life of bird or beast--at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life of any kind possible in the Desert.

Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cl.u.s.ter of adobe ranch houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that child's wealth for life. Navajo men rode up and down the arroyo bed as graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in the close-fitting plush s.h.i.+rts; color in the Germantown blankets--for the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy Lands equals in expressiveness and power Lungren's studies of the Desert; though the Pre-Raphaelites commanded prices of $10,000 and $25,000, where we as a nation grumble about paying our artists one thousand and two thousand.

The Navajo driver nodded back to us that this was Ganado; and in a few moments Mr. Hubbell had come from the trading post to welcome us under a roof that in thirty years has never permitted a stranger to pa.s.s its doors unwelcomed. As Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell has already entered history in the makings of Arizona and as he shuns the limelight quite as "mollycoddles" (his favorite term) seek the spotlights, a slight account of him may not be out of place. First, as to his house: from the outside you see the typical squat adobe oblong so suited to a climate where hot winds are the enemies to comfort. You notice as you enter the front door that the walls are two feet or more thick. Then you take a breath. You had expected a bare ranch interior with benches and stiff chairs backed up against the wall. Instead, you see a huge living-room forty or fifty feet long, every square foot of the walls covered by paintings and drawings of Western life. Every artist of note (with the exception of one) who has done a picture on the Southwest in the last thirty years is represented by a canvas here. You could spend a good week studying the paintings of the Hubbell Ranch. Including sepias, oils and watercolors, there must be almost 300 pictures. By chance, you look up to the raftered ceiling; a specimen of every kind of rare basketry made by the Indians hangs from the beams. On the floor lie Navajo rugs of priceless value and rarest weave. When you go over to Mr. Hubbell's office, you find that he, like Father Berrard, has colored drawings of every type of Moki and Navajo blankets. On the walls of the office are more pictures; on the floors, more rugs; in the safes and cases, specimens of rare silver-work that somehow again remind you of the affinity between Hindoo and Navajo. Mr. Hubbell yearly does a quarter-of-a-million-dollar business in wool, and yearly extends to the Navajos credit for amounts running from twenty-five dollars to fifty thousand dollars--a trust which they have never yet betrayed.

Along the walls of the living-room are doors opening to the sleeping apartments; and in each of the many guest rooms are more pictures, more rugs. Behind the living-room is a _placito_ flanked by the kitchen and cook's quarters.

Now what manner of man is this so-called "King of Northern Arizona"? A lover of art and a patron of it; also the shrewdest politician and trader that ever dwelt in Navajo Land; a man with friends, who would like the privilege of dying for him; also with enemies who would keenly like the privilege of helping him to die. What the chief factors of the Hudson's Bay Company used to be to the Indians of the North, Lorenzo Hubbell has been to the Indians of the Desert--friend, guard, counselor, with a strong hand to punish when they required it, but a stronger hand to befriend when help was needed; always and to the hilt an enemy to the cheap-jack politician who came to exploit the Indian, though he might have to beat the rascal at his own game of putting up a bigger bluff. In appearance, a fine type of the courtly Spanish-American gentleman with Castilian blue eyes and black, beetling brows and gray hair; with a courtliness that keeps you guessing as to how much more gracious the next courtesy can be than the last, and a funny anecdote to cap every climax. You would not think to look at Mr. Hubbell that time was when he as nonchalantly cut the cards for $30,000 and as gracefully lost it all, as other men match dimes for cigars. And you can't make him talk about himself. It is from others you must learn that in the great cattle and sheep war, in which 150 men lost their lives, it was he who led the native Mexican sheep owners against the aggressive cattle crowd. They are all friends now, the old-time enemies, and have buried their feud; and dynamite will not force Mr. Hubbell to open his mouth on the subject. In fact, it was a pair of the "rustlers" themselves who told me of the time that the cowboys took a swoop into the Navajo Reserve and stampeded off 300 of the Indians' best horses; but they had reckoned without Lorenzo Hubbell. In twenty-four hours he had got together the swiftest riders of the Navajos; and in another twenty-four hours, he had pursued the thieves 125 miles into the wildest canons of Arizona and had rescued every horse. One of the men, whom he had pursued, wiped the sweat from his brow in memory of it. He is more than a type of the Spanish-American gentleman. He is a type of the man that the Desert produces: quiet, soft spoken--powerfully soft spoken--alert, keen, relentless and versatile; but also a dreamer of dreams, a seer of visions, a pa.s.sionate patriot, and a lover of art who proves his love by buying.

The Navajos are to-day by long odds the most prosperous Indians in America. Their vast Reserve offers ample pasturage for their sheep and ponies; and though their flocks are a scrub lot, yielding little more than fifty to seventy cents a head in wool on the average, still it costs nothing to keep sheep and goats. Both furnish a supply of meat.

The hides fetch ready money. So does the wool, so do the blankets; and the Navajos are the finest silversmiths in America. Formerly, they obtained their supply of raw silver bullion from the Spaniards; but to-day, they melt and hammer down United States currency into b.u.t.terfly brooches and snake bracelets and leather belts with the fifty-cent coins changed into flower blossoms with a turquoise center. Ten-cent pieces and quarters are transformed into necklaces of silver beads, or b.u.t.tons for s.h.i.+rt and moccasins. If you buy these things in the big Western cities, they are costly as Chinese or Hindoo silver; but on the Reserve, there is a very simple way of computing the value. First, take the value of the coin from which the silver ornament is made. Add a dollar for the silversmith's labor; and also add whatever value the turquoise happens to be; and you have the price for which true Navajo silver-work can be bought out on the Reserve.

Among the Navajos, the women weave the blankets and baskets; among the Moki, the men, while the women are the great pottery makers. The value of these out on the Reserve is exactly in proportion to the intricacy of the work, the plain native wool colors--black, gray, white and brown--varying in price from seventy cents to $1.25 a pound; the fine bayetta or red weave, which is finer than any machine can produce and everlasting in its durability, fetching pretty nearly any price the owner asks. Other colors than the bayetta red and native wool shades, I need scarcely say here, are in bought mineral dyes. True bayettas, which are almost a lost art, bring as high as $1,500 each from a connoisseur.

Other native wools vary in price according to size and color from $15 to $150. Off the Reserve, these prices are simply doubled. From all of which, it should be evident that no thrifty Navajo need be poor. His house costs nothing. It is made of cedar shakes stuck up in the ground crutchwise and wattled with mud. Strangely enough, the Navajo no longer uses his own blankets. They are too valuable; also, too heavy for the climate. He uses the cheap and gaudy Germantown patterns.

At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from Ganado for Keam's Canon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied pa.s.sers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a system that must surely be changed, not because the public love Mr.

Hubbell "less, but more."

The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac light--tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued glory--with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through notches of the painted peaks. _Hogan_ after _hogan_, with sheep corrals in cedar shakes, we pa.s.sed, where little boys and girls were driving the sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the summit--the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests.

In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two belts.

Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you hardly realize it till you slither down a sand bank and find yourself between the yellow pumice walls of a blind _cul-de-sac_ in the rock--nooning place--where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone.

Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in the Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds flas.h.i.+ng phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."

This spring is about half of the fifty-five miles between Ganado and Keam's Canon; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the first: more lilac-colored mesas high above the top of the world, with the encircling peaks like the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue as the bluest turquoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of evergreens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the lower world, and you are in Keam's Canon, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods, steep as a carved wall. You pa.s.s the ruins of the old government school, where the floods drove the scholars out, and see the big rock commemorating Kit Carson's famous fight long ago, and come on the new Indian schools where 150 little Navajos and Mokis are being taught by Federal appointees--schools as fine in every respect as the best educational inst.i.tutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must obtain a permit to go on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville are the _Ultima Thule_ of the trail across the Painted Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civilization and as hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) as when the Spaniard first came among them. In fact, the only remnants of Spanish influence left at some of these mesas are the dwarfed peach orchards growing in the arid sands. These were planted centuries ago by the Spanish _padres_.

The trading post managed by Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr., at Keam's Canon is but a replica of his father's establishment at Ganado. Here is the same fine old Spanish hospitality. Here, too, is a rare though smaller collection of Western paintings. There are rugs from every part of the Navajo Land, and specimens of pottery from the Three Mesas--especially from Nampaii, the wonderful woman pottery maker of the First Mesa--and fine silver-work gathered from the Navajo silversmiths. And with it all is the gracious perfection of the art that conceals art, the air that you are conferring a favor on the host to accept rest in a little rose-covered bower of two rooms and a parlor placed at the command of guests.

The last lap of the drive across the Painted Desert is by all odds the hardest stretch of the road, as well as the most interesting. It is here the Mokis, or Hopi, have their reservation in the very heart of Navajo Land; and there will be no quarrel over possession of this land. It lies a sea of yellow sand with high rampant islands--600, 1,000, 1,500 feet above the plains--of yellow _tufa_ and white gypsum rock, sides as sheer as a wall, the top a flat plateau but for the crest where perch the Moki villages. Up the narrow acclivities leading to these mesa crests the Mokis must bring all provisions, all water, their ponies and donkeys. If they could live on atmosphere, on views of a painted world at their feet receding to the very drop over the sky-line, with tones and half-tones and subtle suggestions of opaline snow peaks swimming in the lilac haze hundreds of miles away, you would not wonder at their choosing these eerie eagle nests for their cities; for the coloring below is as gorgeous and brilliant as in the Grand Canon. But you see their little farm patches among the sand billows below, the peach trees almost uprooted by the violence of the wind, literally and truly, a stone placed where the corn has been planted to prevent seed and plantlet from being blown away. Or if the Navajo still raided the Moki, you could understand them toiling like beasts of burden carrying water up to these hilltops; but the day of raid and foray is forever past.

It was on our way back over this trail that we learned one good reason why the dwellers of this land must keep to the high rock crests.

Crossing the high mesa, we had felt the wind begin to blow, when like Drummond's Habitant Skipper, "it blew and then it blew some more." By the time we reached the sandy plain below, such a hurricane had broken as I have seen only once before, and that was off the coast of Labrador, when for six hours we could not see the sea for the foam. The billows of sand literally lifted. You could not see the sandy plain for a dust fine as flour that wiped out every landmark three feet ahead of your horses'

noses. The wheels sank hub deep in sand. Of trail, not a sign was left; and you heard the same angry roar as in a hurricane at sea. But like the eternal rocks, dim and serene and high above the turmoil, stood the First Mesa village of Moki Land. Perhaps after all, these little squat Pueblo Indians knew what they were doing when they built so high above the dust storms. Twice the rear wheels lifted for a glorious upset; but we veered and tacked and whipped the f.a.gged horses on. For three hours the hurricane lasted, and when finally it sank with an angry growl and we came out of the fifteen miles of sand into sagebrush and looked back, the rosy tinge of an afterglow lay on the gray pile of stone where the Moki town crests the top of the lofty mesa.

In justice to travelers and Desert dwellers, two or three facts should be added. Such dust storms occur only in certain spring months. So much in fairness to the Painted Desert. Next, I have cursorily given slight details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers to think the Painted Desert can be crossed with the comfort of a Pullman car. You have to pay for your fun. We paid in that blinding, stinging, smothering blast as from a furnace, from three to half past five. Women are supposed to be irrepressible talkers. Well--we came to the point where not a soul in the carriage could utter a word for the dust.

Lastly, when we saw that the storm was to be such a genuine old-timer, we ought to have tied wet handkerchiefs across our mouths. Gla.s.ses we had to keep the dust out of our eyes; but that dust is alkali, and it took a good two weeks' sneezing and a very sore throat to get rid of it.

Of the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville, s.p.a.ce forbids details except that they are higher than the village at Acoma. Overlooking the Painted Desert in every direction, they command a view that beggars all description and almost staggers thought. You seem to be overlooking Almighty G.o.d's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored infinity; and naturally you go dumb with joy of the beauty of it and lose your own personality and perspective utterly. We lunched on the brink of a white precipice 1,500 feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that declivity with urns of water on their heads, and photographed naked urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood above _estufas_, or sacred underground council chambers, where the Pueblos held their religious rites before the coming of the Spaniards.

Of the Moki towns, Oraibi is, perhaps, cleaner and better than the Three Mesas. The mesas are indescribably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you can wander through adobe houses clean as your own home quarters, the adobe hard as cement, the rooms divided into sleeping apartments, cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the Grand Canon, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as the Canon.

If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains, which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to the Grand Canon. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands, dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa.

"We love you," exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government doctor interpreted for us), "we love you with all our hearts and have come down to wish you a good-by."

CHAPTER VIII

THE GRAND CAnON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS

The belt of National Forests west of the Painted Desert and Navajo Land comprises that strange area of onyx and agate known as the Petrified Forests, the upland pine parks of the Francisco Mountains round Flagstaff, the vast territory of the Grand Canon, and the western slope between the Continental Divide and the Pacific.

Needless to say, it takes a great deal longer to see these forests than to write about them. You could spend a good two weeks in each area, and then come away conscious that you had seen only the beginnings of the wonders in each. For instance, the Petrified Forests cover an area of 2,000 acres that could keep you busy for a week. Then, when you think you have seen everything, you learn of some hieroglyphic inscriptions on a nearby rock, with lettering which no scientist has yet deciphered, but with pictographs resembling the ancient Phoenician signs from which our own alphabet is supposed to be derived. Also, after you have viewed the canons and upland pine parks and snowy peaks and cliff dwellings round Flagstaff and have recovered from the surprise of learning there are upland pine parks and snowy peaks twelve to fourteen thousand feet high in the Desert, you may strike south and see the Aztec ruins of Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, or go yet farther afield to the Great Natural Bridge of Southern Arizona, or explore near Winslow a great crater-like cavity supposed to mark the sinking of some huge meteorite.

Of the Grand Canon little need be said here; not because there is nothing to say, but because all the superlatives you can pile on, all the scientific explanations you can give, are so utterly inadequate. You can count on one hand the number of men who have explored the whole length of the Grand Canon--200 miles--and hundreds of the lesser canons that strike off sidewise from Grand Canon are still unexplored and unexploited. Then, when you cross the Continental Divide and come on down to the Angeles Forests in from Los Angeles, and the Cleveland in from San Diego, you are in a poor-man's paradise so far as a camp holiday is concerned. For $3 a week you are supplied with tent, camp kit and all. If there are two of you, $6 a week will cover your holiday; and forty cents by electric car takes you out to your stamping ground. An average of 200 people a month go out to one or other of the Petrified Forests. From Flagstaff, 100 people a month go in to see the cliff dwellings. Not less than 30,000 people a year visit the Grand Canon and 100,000 people yearly camp and holiday in the Angeles and Cleveland Forests. And we are but at the beginning of the discovery of our own Western Wonderland. Who shall say that the National Forests are not the People's Playground of _all_ America; that they do not belong to the East as much as to the West; that East and West are not alike concerned in maintaining and protecting them?

You strike into the Petrified Forests from Adamana or Holbrook. Adamana admits you to one section of the petrified area, Holbrook to another--both equally marvelous and easily accessible. If you go out in a big tally-ho with several others in the rig, the charge will be from $1.50 to $2.50. If you hire a driver and fast team for yourself, the charge will be from $4 to $6. Both places have hotels, their charges varying from $1 and $1.50 in Holbrook, to $2 and $2.50 at Adamana. The hotel puts up your luncheon and water keg, and the trips can be made, with the greatest ease in a day.

Don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting thrills of the big knock-you-down variety! To go from the s.p.a.cious glories of the boundless Painted Desert to the little 2,000-acre area of the Petrified Forests is like pa.s.sing from a big Turner or Watts canvas in the Tate Gallery, London, to a tiny study in blue mist and stars by Whistler. If you go looking for "big" things you'll come away disappointed; but if like Tennyson and Bobby Burns and Wordsworth, "the flower in the crannied wall" has as much beauty for you as the ocean or a mountain, you'll come away touched with the mystery of that Southwestern Wonderland quite as much as if you had come out of all the riotous intoxication of color in the Painted Desert.

In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic, sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light, when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.

Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the G.o.ds of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the gravel in this fas.h.i.+on. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the rec.u.mbent trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and he declared without hesitation that many of these p.r.o.ne, pillared giants must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.

The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are unknown. Only water--oceans and aeons of water--could have rolled and swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.

[Ill.u.s.tration: There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Canon in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and been disappointed]

But there is another side to the Petrified Forests besides a prehistoric, geologic one. Split one of the big or little pieces of petrified wood open, and you find pure onyx, pure agate, the colors of the rainbow, which every youngster has tried to catch in its hands, caught by a Master Hand and transfixed forever in the eternal rocks.

Crosswise, the split shows the concentric circles of the wood grain in blues and purples and reds and carmines and golds and lilacs and primrose pinks. Split the stone longitudinally and you have the same colors in water-waves brilliant as a diamond, hard as a diamond, so hard you can only break it along the grain of the ancient wood, so hard, fortunately, that it almost defies man-machinery for a polish. This hardness has been a blessing in disguise; for before the Petrified Forests were made by Act of Congress a National Park, or Monument, the petrified wood was exploited commercially and s.h.i.+pped away in carloads to be polished. You can see some shafts of the polished specimens in any of the big Eastern museums; but it was found that the petrified wood required machinery as expensive and fine as for diamonds to effect a hard polish, and the thing was not commercially possible; so the Petrified Forests will never be vandalized.

You lunch under a natural bridge formed by the huge shaft of a p.r.o.ne giant, and step off more fallen pillars to find lengths greater than 130 feet, and seat yourself on stump ends of a rare enough beauty for an emperor's throne; but always you come back to the first pleasures of a child--picking up the smaller pebbles, each pebble as if there had been a sun shower of rainbow drops and each drop had crystallized into colored diamonds.

I said don't go to the Petrified Forests expecting a big thrill. Yet if you have eyes that really see, and go there after a rain when every single bit of rock is as.h.i.+ne with the colors of broken rainbows; or go there at high noon, when every color strikes back in spangles of light--there is something the matter with you if you don't have a big thrill with a capital "B."

There is another pleasure on your trip to the Petrified Forests, which you will get if you know how, but completely miss if you don't. All these drivers to the Forests are old-timers of the days when Arizona was a No-Man's-Land. For instance, Al Stevenson, the custodian at Adamana, was one of the men along with Commodore Owen of San Diego and Bert Potter of the Forestry Department, Was.h.i.+ngton, who rescued Sheriff Woods of Holbrook from a lynching party in the old sheep and cattle war days.

Stevenson can tell that story as few men know it; and dozens of others he can tell of the old, wild, pioneer days when a man had to be all man and fearless to his trigger tips, or cash in, and cash in quick. At Holbrook you can get the story of the Show-Low Ranch and all the $50,000 worth of stock won in a cut of cards; or of how they hanged Stott and Scott and Wilson--mere boys, two of them in Tonto Basin, for horses which they didn't steal. All through this Painted Desert you are just on the other side of a veil from the Land of True Romance; but you'll not lift that veil, believe me, with a patronizing Eastern question. You'll find your way in, if you know how; and if you don't know how, no man can teach you. And at Adamana, don't forget to see the pictograph rocks.

Then you'll appreciate why the scientists wonder whether the antiquity of the Orient is old as the antiquity of our own America.

Flagstaff, frankly, does not live up to its own opportunities. It is the gateway to many Aztec ruins--much more easily accessible to the public than the Frijoles cave dwellings of New Mexico. Only nine miles out by easy trail are cliff dwellings in Walnut Canon. These differ from the Frijoles in not being caves. The ancient people have simply taken advantage of natural arches high in the face of unscalable precipices and have bricked up the faces of these with adobe. As far as I know, not so much as the turn of a spade has ever been attempted in excavation.

The debris of centuries lies on the floors of the houses; and the adobe brick in front is gradually crumbling and rolling down the precipice into Walnut Canon. Nor is there any doubt but that slight excavation would yield discoveries. You find bits of pottery and shard in the debris piles; and the day we went out, five minutes' scratching over of one cliff floor unearthed bits of wampum sh.e.l.l that from the perforations had evidently been used as a necklace. The Forestry Service has a man stationed here to guard the old ruins; but the Government might easily go a step further and give him authority to attempt some slight restoration. You drive across a cinder plain from Flagstaff and suddenly drop down to a footpath that takes you to the brink of circling gray stone canons many hundreds of feet deep. Along the top ledges of these amid such rocks as mountain sheep might frequent are the cliff houses--hundreds and hundreds of them, which no one has yet explored. At the bottom of the lonely, silent, dark canon was evidently once a stream; but no stream has flowed here in the memory of the white race; and the cliff houses give evidence of even greater age than the caves.

Only forty-seven miles south of Flagstaff are Montezuma's Castle and Well. Drivers can be hired in Flagstaff to take you out at from $4 to $6 a day; and there are ranch houses near the Castle and the Well, where you can stay at very trifling cost, indeed.

It comes as a surprise to see here at Flagstaff, wedged between the Painted Desert and the arid plains of the South, the snow-capped peaks of the Francisco Mountains ranging from 12,000 to 13,000 feet high, an easy climb to the novice. Only twenty miles out at Oak Creek is one of the best trout brooks of the Southwest; and twenty-five miles out is a ranch house in a cool canon where health and holiday seekers can stay all the year in the Verde Valley. It is from East Verde that you go to the Natural Bridge. The central span of this bridge is 100 feet from the creek bottom, and the creek itself deposits lime so rapidly that if you drop a stone or a hat down, it at once encrusts and petrifies. Also at Flagstaff is the famous Lowell Observatory. In fact, if Flagstaff lived up to its opportunities, if there were guides, cheap tally-hos and camp outfitters on the spot, it could as easily have 10,000 tourists a month as it now has between 100 and 200.

When you reach the Grand Canon, you have come to the uttermost wonder of the Southwestern Wonder World. There is nothing else like it in America.

There is nothing else remotely resembling it in the known world; and no one has yet been heard of who has come to the Grand Canon and gone away disappointed. If the Grand Canon were in Egypt or the Alps, it is safe to wager it would be visited by every one of the 300,000 Americans who yearly throng Continental resorts. As it is, only 30,000 people a year visit it; and a large proportion of them are foreigners.