the front of Oppapago, having the
high ranges to the right and the foothills and the great Bitter Lake
below it on the left. The mesa holds very level here, cut across at
intervals by the deep washes of dwindling streams, and its treeless
spaces uncramp the soul.

Mesa trails were meant to be traveled on horseback, at the jigging
coyote trot that only western-bred horses learn successfully. A
foot-pace carries one too slowly past the units in a decorative scheme
that is on a scale with the country round for bigness. It takes days'
journeys to give a note of variety to the country of the social shrubs.
These chiefly clothe the benches and eastern foot-slopes of the
Sierras,--great spreads of artemisia, _coleogyne_, and spinosa,
suffering no other woody stemmed thing in their purlieus; this by
election apparently, with no elbowing; and the several shrubs have each
their clientele of flowering herbs. It would be worth knowing how much
the devastating sheep have had to do with driving the tender plants to
the shelter of the prickle-bushes. It might have begun earlier, in the
time Seyavi of the campoodie tells of, when antelope ran on the mesa
like sheep for numbers, but scarcely any foot-high herb rears itself
except from the midst of some stout twigged shrub; larkspur in the
_coleogyne_, and for every spinosa the purpling coils of phacelia. In
the shrub shelter, in the season, flock the little stemless things whose
blossom time is as short as a marriage song. The larkspurs make the best
showing, being tall and sweet, swaying a little above the shrubbery,
scattering pollen dust which Navajo brides gather to fill their marriage
baskets. This were an easier task than to find two of them of a shade.
Larkspurs in the botany are blue, but if you were to slip rein to the
stub of some black sage and set about proving it you would be still at
it by the hour when the white gilias set their pale disks to the
westering sun. This is the gilia the children call "evening snow," and
it is no use trying to improve on children's names for wild flowers.

From the height of a horse you look down to clean spaces in a shifty
yellow soil, bare to the eye as a newly sanded floor. Then as soon as
ever the hill shadows begin to swell out from the sidelong ranges, come
little flakes of whiteness fluttering at the edge of the sand. By dusk
there are tiny drifts in the lee of every strong shrub, rosy-tipped
corollas as riotous in the sliding mesa