y draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like
bits of heaven, because their faces shine with the light of an unclouded
sky from dawn to dark.

You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses
belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on
horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the
figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses
and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in
Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off
earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids
enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an
Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and
lilac light and heat haze shimmering and unreal as a poet's vision.

It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the
planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to shimmer and
shift and lift from earth in mirage altogether.

You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of
herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not
poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready
money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches
suffice for meal.

Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pass into a
large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow
_tufa_ walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky
and unreal. Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when
you lift your eyes, and there--straight ahead--lies an enchanted island
in this lake of light, shimmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical
yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three
Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of
perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or
sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple
sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.

Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. "The
Enchanted Mesa," he says.

I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man
has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a
race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge
rock? Lummis says "yes;" Hodge says "no." Are there pottery remnants of