litude, its fantastic savageness, is either appalling or
repulsive. To them it is tiresome and monotonous. The vast plains of
Kansas and Nebraska are monotonous even in the agricultural green of
summer. Not so to me the desert. It is as changeable in its lights and
colors as the ocean. It is even in its general features of sameness
never long the same. If you traverse it on foot or on horseback, there
is ever some minor novelty. And on the swift train, if you draw down the
curtain against the glare, or turn to your book, you are sure to miss
something of interest--a deep canon rift in the plain, a turn that gives
a wide view glowing in a hundred hues in the sun, a savage gorge with
beetling rocks, a solitary butte or red truncated pyramid thrust up into
the blue sky, a horizontal ledge cutting the horizon line as straight as
a ruler for miles, a pointed cliff uplifted sheer from the plain and
laid in regular courses of Cyclopean masonry, the battlements of a fort,
a terraced castle with towers and esplanade, a great trough of a valley,
gray and parched, enclosed by far purple mountains. And then the
unlimited freedom of it, its infinite expansion, its air like wine to
the senses, the floods of sunshine, the waves of color, the translucent
atmosphere that aids the imagination to create in the distance all
architectural splendors and realms of peace. It is all like a mirage and
a dream. We pass swiftly, and make a moving panorama of beauty in hues,
of strangeness in forms, of sublimity in extent, of overawing and savage
antiquity. I would miss none of it. And when we pass to the accustomed
again, to the fields of verdure and the forests and the hills of green,
and are limited in view and shut in by that which we love, after all,
better than the arid land, I have a great longing to see again the
desert, to be a part of its vastness, and to feel once more the freedom
and inspiration of its illimitable horizons.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE HEART OF THE DESERT.

There is an arid region lying in Northern Arizona and Southern Utah
which has been called the District of the Grand Canon of the Colorado.
The area, roughly estimated, contains from 13,000 to 16,000 square
miles--about the size of the State of Maryland. This region, fully
described by the explorers and studied by the geologists in the United
States service, but little known to even the travelling public, is
probably the most interesting territory of its size on the