The first effect of the desert upon any human being must be one of surprise—surprise at the contrast between the preconceived idea which the word suggests and its variety of beauty—a beauty which becomes for many an irresistible fascination, a magnet that allures and brings its lovers back again and again.

The simplicity of great spaces and great masses is one of the supreme influences of life. Together with limitless vistas of possibility, there is in them a serenity that brings calm and meditative repose.

However far the eye is carried in the desert of the Southwest, one is never wearied by monotony. Everywhere the undulating sands, hardly held in place by scanty vegetation when the winds blow their wildest, are driven into long rippling waves, or into hillocks, by the Spaniards called lomas. Even while you watch, this shifting, drifting sand takes on many hues. Sometimes it is grey, or pale buff, or almost white, more rarely golden. Out of it grows, here and there, the pungent greasewood, the stunted cedar and the thorny, freakish cacti unfurling gay flags of color to catch the wandering bee.

Cutting the horizon, barrier mountain ranges appear, whose long, restful lines lend a new note of titanic power to the harmony; and every now and again, rock-islands, solitary, abrupt, imposing, tell of other forces silently working through untold ages and leaving behind forms beautiful or merely fantastic. Of all the magnetic elements of the landscape these are the most manifest. But the supreme thing, the over-powering glory, is the majesty of light and the splendor of color that is so all-pervading, all-enfolding in the desert that, before we are aware of it, we become sympathetic with the belief of the indigenous race in sorcery.

In some far foretime the whole of this vast area was an inland sea. Sand and wind in the long interval since the waters receded have done their part in the task of erosion as effectually as do ocean waves beating upon coast-wise cliffs.[1] The work of these elemental forces is uneven. The softer rock has given way. That which is harder is left sculptured into forms that everywhere invite the imagination. To many of them descriptive names have become permanently attached. Such is Locomotive Rock, lifted high above the road between Casa Blanca and Ácoma in astonishing realism. Most extraordinary is the line of heads and trunks of eleven colossal elephants that may be seen two miles away from Ácoma toward its farm-lands. By wind and sand-blast they have been eroded from the oyster-grey stone to such lifelikeness that fancy grows almost into conviction that here we have the work of forgotten sculptors such as once were bred in Egypt or Chaldæa. Forms like these, in solitudes like these, lead to quick recognition of the source of anthropomorphic worship by the sensitively alert mind of primeval man. Such a portentous figure as that called the Kit Carson monument near Fort Defiance arrests the gaze, bizarre and unlovely though it is. Carved by no human hands, it must have seemed to untutored minds a thing supernatural.

In these high altitudes the clear, thin air brings exhilaration of spirit and an unwonted sense of physical well-being that “scorns laborious days” and banishes fatigue. True, at times one may be almost blinded by the shimmering brilliance of “the colored air.” But because the vast stretch of almost treeless earth acts everywhere as a reflector, it is indirect radiation and the lack of shade, rather than direct heat, from which one occasionally needs to seek shelter.

With night there comes an indescribably awesome silence—an isolation, an infinity of separation from all one has ever known; but soon the eyes, uplifted to “the floor of heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,” are soothed and quieted out of all alarm, and blessed sleep brings unconsciousness to human spirits which may not too long hold converse with divinity.

Three of us had spent days of incomparable interest and pleasure visiting the chief monuments of Mesa Land, Zuñi and Tusayán; Inscription Rock[2] with its autograph record of heroic adventurers; the Cañon de Chelly and the Cañon del Muerto, where prehistoric pueblos are built, on rocky shelves or in natural caves, so high above the wet floor of the river that they look like toy villages. From the limitless champaign we had seen solitary mesas lifted up like no other mountain architecture on earth. They varied in size from little islands to great table lands ten miles long and more. To the traveller’s surprise some of these “islands” prove to be peninsulas. This was the case at Hopi. A raised topographic map disclosed the fact that the three mesas (table lands) whereon were built the Seven Cities of Tusayán (Hopi) in the dateless centuries before the coming of Columbus, are really long, irregular fingers pushing out from a single enormous plateau. They are separated from one another by miles of sage-grown plain through which run deep washes, torn by violent streams in periodic seasons of storm, but now as dry and empty of life as extinct craters. The highest point, from which these fabled cities rise in picturesque dignity, is only seven or eight hundred feet above the plain; but we are told that on its farthest rim to the north, this plateau drops a sheer three thousand feet. Long rocky tongues such as these, high and rugged, difficult of access and therefore easily defended, and, moreover, commanding far views of the deep, wide valleys stretching between the highlands, offered to the agricultural Indian a natural fortress of defense from his hereditary foe, who roamed the plains whithersoever the hunting of the buffalo willed that he should go.

Like all the semi-desert country, the valley land seems level until you begin to traverse it. Then the roughness and the strange uplifts and hollows suggest a world still in the making, an emergence from chaos, left but never conquered. But not all is desert. Much beautiful wooded country lies scattered through the Navajo reservation on the way to Hopi Land. On the high plateaus, tall pines and cedars, interspersed with a lower growth of oaks, give the nomad Navajo ample room for his wandering flocks and a hidden shelter for his solitary hogan (hut) whether it be of adobe or of brushwood. No undergrowth obscures the long vistas through the forest, but a carpet of luxuriant grass dotted with brilliant flowers gives pasturage for the woolly flock that provides both clothing and food for the Navajo. One of our keenest memories will always be of the deliciously aromatic scent of cedar burning in these hogans. Rising like incense through the limpid air, it suggested ancient smokes from primeval altars, kindled by the torch snatched from the Fire-God by Coyote.

More pervading and far more magical than the spicy odor of the cedars, was our consciousness of color throughout the land. Color, translucent, evanescent, mysteriously light-irradiated color, everywhere! From the high vault of heaven it came flooding down over the soft greys and buffs of the sandstone mesas, broken by every tone of red, beautiful and varied, running the whole gamut of salmon-pink, rust-red, and vermilion to deep mahogany and royal porphyry. The tones blend, contrast, or are thrown into sharp relief, against backgrounds of dark fir, or foregrounds of that elusive silver of the sage, which is neither grey nor green. Such tapestry of silver-green, covering as it does long rolling valleys and low foothills of the plains, makes a restful foil to the more brilliant and more solemn elements of the earth-picture.

The supreme effect upon the eye of such a palette is dependent, after all, upon the crystalline quality of the light and the ever-changeful and mysterious movement of cloud-shadows. Here one rediscovers for himself the truth the artists taught us long ago, that purple is the complement of yellow. The gold and buff of the soil and the ranges are suffused by the lavenders, violets and deep purples in every shaded cavern, through the wizardry of the over-arching heavens.

Thinking backward through the historic years, it is no surprise to find how unlike each other are the types of Indians in this country. Those tribes who, since an immemorial age, have roved and fought and won their way through alertness of eye and limb, must have acquired physical and mental variations, even if once they were evolved from the same stock as the Indian of fixed dwellings and sedentary habits.[3]

To us the Navajo embodied our preconceived idea of the Indian. He is tall, powerfully built, often handsome, with high cheek bones and an impassive face—mask-like in its haughty, sometimes brutal, stillness. Even in a dance that we watched, nothing stirred his expression. The Navajo is to-day, just as in the elder time, a roamer, pre-eminently the herdsman, so that it is rare to find even as many as two or three of his hogans clustered near a watering place.[4]

The dweller in the pueblos seems almost like a being of a different race from the man of the plains. Shorter of stature, he is more delicate of frame. His hands and feet are noticeably small, as if adapted to the prehensile method of scaling his precipitous cliffs by toe and finger holes. Likewise he is gentler mannered, and his dignified reception of the stranger suggests a hospitable response that at first raises hopes of some genuine mutual confidence. But alas for hopes like these! All too soon one realizes that he will impart no slightest inkling of the meaning to him of his inherited tradition, his religious beliefs or his present-day customs. One wonders whether, even if one could speak his language, there would be any great gain, for the Indian is past-master in adroit and civil dissembling, in the use of words and gestures that beguile, but do not reveal the inner workings of his mind. Under “the bitter lessons of contact with exploiting white” civilization, he has become more secretive, so that his legends, his traditional ritual, and his ancestral customs are fast disappearing. Swift must be the salvage if all is not to be forever lost.

An impressive example of such inevitable change may be seen at Walpi, where there is in process of construction in the valley a new system of irrigation and water supply which will abolish the painfully toilsome task of carrying water from the foot of the mesa to the dwellings on its summit. Inevitably the younger generation will abandon the no longer needed rock of safety for a comfortable and easy existence in the valley near their crops and herds.

Walpi must become a National Monument under federal protection. It is unique. In situation it reminds the traveller of Castrogiovanni above the Vale of Enna in Sicily or of Segovia in Spain, and it is no less worthy of admiration.

Such is the strong and abiding contrast between the Indian of fixed settlements, and the wanderer of the plains who at any day and hour may strike his tent and silently take his way far afield leading his flocks to greener pastures. A homeless gipsying life? Yet he sets up as easily as if it were for always his little forge on which he beats out the silver bracelets he knows the white man covets, or his loom whereon he weaves the blankets that often bring large sums.

One thing the two types of Indian have in common. It is their belief that after all these generations the white man has never proved that he has a remedy for the ills of life half so good as that which their forbears practised and have handed on for use to-day. They are unconvinced that a rule of conduct more honest or more wise has been shown them even by the religious teachers of the ruling people. Whether in medicine or in morals, their ancients still are their guides and resolutely do they keep inviolate the old prescription.

Sometimes our way crossed or followed ancient trails marked out by the invading Spanish pioneers, who must have been amazed at the similarity of this country to their mother land of Spain, and more particularly of Aragón. Between Zuñi and Ácoma we were actually on the first path ever trodden by the feet of white men in this Southwestern country. Then were brought forth from the master’s brief-case precious, and as yet unpublished, translations of old diaries.

Great was our excitement to learn that on these trails may still be found the water holes so accurately described three centuries ago for the guidance of those who should come after. Distances were so carefully measured and noted that to-day they are affirmed to be correct by men living in the region. Experiences such as these kept us all in an enchanted atmosphere. We seemed like actors in an ancient story of exploration rather than people surrounded by present-day events. As we read these diaries upon the very route they detail, there seemed to pass before our eyes in its integrity that strange company of soldiers and priests, well armed and well mounted, followed by the crowd of half-hypnotized, half-terrified natives. Little the Spaniards recked of the hardships of the way; what they saw was Opportunity, Fortune, denied them in the old world they had left. We felt again how, in the virginal wilderness, lured forward by a vision of that “Beyond” where lay a treasure of unstinted gold—gold of the field, gold of the unplumbed rock, gold of souls saved from everlasting death—each man had been led by his individual imagination and by the great general Hope, on and on, undaunted, “to seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield.” Caught by the glamour of the buoyant air, we, far-away inheritors of those “dreamers, dreaming greatly,” realized how much our country owes to them, men of an alien race and breed, in that along with their pursuit of material gain, great ideals were held aloft. Lines of Kipling’s verse were borne hauntingly on the breeze: “came the whisper, came the vision, came the Power with the Need”.... “It’s God’s present to our nation. Anybody might have found it, but His whisper came to”—Spain.