ramparts, and nestling in an angle of rock you see a little fenced ranch
house, where they charge ten cents a glass for the privilege of their
spring. There is the same profusion of gorgeous desert flowers, dyed in
the very essence of the sun, as you saw round the Enchanted Mesa--globe
cactus and yellow poppies and wild geraniums and little blue
forget-me-nots and a rattlesnake flower with a bloated bladder seed pod
mottled as its prototype's skin. And the trail still climbs till you
drop sheer over the edge of the sky-line and see a new world swimming
below you in lakes of lilac light and blue shadows--blue shadows, sure
sign of desert land as Northern lights are of hyperborean realm. It is
the Painted Desert; and it isn't a flat sand plain as you expected, but
a world of rolling green and purple and red hills receding from you in
the waves of a sea to the belted, misty mountains rising up sheer in a
sky wall. And it isn't a desolate, uninhabited waste, as you expected.
You round a ridge of yellow rock, and three Zuni boys are loping along
the trail in front of you--red headband, hair in a braid, red sash,
velvet trousers--the most famous runners of all Indian tribes in spite
of their short, squat stature. The Navajo trusts to his pony, and so is
a slack runner. Also, he is not so well nourished as the Zuni or Hopi,
and so has not as firm muscles and strong lungs. These Zuni lads will
set out from Oraibi at daybreak, and run down to Holbrook, eighty miles
in a day. Or you hear the tinkle of a bell, and see some little Navajo
girl on horseback driving her herd of sheep down to a drinking pool. It
all has a curiously Egyptian or Oriental effect. So Rachel was watering
her flocks when the Midianitish herders drove her from the spring; and
you see the same rivalry for possession of the waterhole in our own
desert country as ancient record tells of that other storied land.

The hay stacks, huge, tent-shaped _tufa_ rocks to the right of the road,
mark the approach to St. Michael's Mission. Where one great rock has
splintered from the main wall is a curious phenomenon noted by all
travelers--a cow, head and horns, etched in perfect outline against the
face of the rock. The driver tells you it is a trick of rain and stain,
but a knowledge of the tricks of lightning stamping pictures on objects
struck in an atmosphere heavily charged with electricity suggests
another explanation.

Then you have crossed the bridge and the red-t