ent
lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is
emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me
there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the
antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric
ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of
the world in the School of Archaeology at Rome, "the more undecided we
become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America,
or that of America preceded the Orient."

For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into
Canyon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above
the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined
chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could
hide and lose a dozen of our national White House. Who built the
aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in
it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of
answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you
haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do
your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route--cost for
team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a
well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will
know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered
the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.

To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at
Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Canyon; but to cross it,
you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and
drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to
point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to
$7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack
animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price--$25 to
$40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a
white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is
as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools
where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in
the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months--July and
August--does not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and
night will stretch a sk