d Desert with all its wonder and
mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of
high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting
seas of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the
movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It
isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first
high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world,
a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks
and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America
at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these
Navajo boys--a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a
hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or
bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white
cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more
silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an
Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red
sand knobs--you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their
_hogan_ houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain,
scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving
at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night
and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of
silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the
juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the
wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot
vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat--bleating till the air
quivers--driven by little Navajo girls on horseback, born to the
saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.

If you can't go to Zuni Land and the White Mountain Forest and the
Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the
sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort.
Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own
Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in
antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of
the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place--in the Coconino
and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Canyon. And if the lure of the antique
still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impud