tains is only a tiny wave of purplish green sky-line like the edge
of an inverted blue bowl.

[Illustration: The Moki Indian pueblo of Walpi, in northeastern Arizona,
stands on a mesa high above the plain]

The mesas rise and rise, and presently you are out and above forest line
altogether among the sagebrush shimmering in pure light; and you become
aware of a great quiet, a great silence, such as you feel on mountain
peaks; and you suddenly realize how rare and scarce life is--life of
bird or beast--at these high levels. The reason is, of course, the
scarcity of water, though on our way out just below this mesa at the
side of a dry arroyo we found one of the wayside springs that make life
of any kind possible in the Desert.

Then the trail began dropping down, down in loops and twists; and just
at sunset we turned up a dry arroyo bed to a cluster of adobe ranch
houses and store and mission. Thousands of plaintively bleating goats
and sheep seemed to be coming out of the juniper hills to the watering
pool, herded as usual by little girls; for the custom is to dower each
child at birth with sheep or ponies, the increase of which becomes that
child's wealth for life. Navajo men rode up and down the arroyo bed as
graceful and gayly caparisoned as Arabs, or lounged around the store
building smoking. Huge wool wagons loaded three layers deep with the
season's fleece stood in front of the rancho. Women with children
squatted on the ground, but the thing that struck you first as always in
the Painted Desert was color: color in the bright headbands; color in
the close-fitting plush shirts; color in the Germantown blankets--for
the Navajo blanket is too heavy for Desert use; color in the lemon and
lilac belts across the sunset sky; color, more color, in the blood-red
sand hills and bright ochre rocks and whirling orange dust clouds where
riders or herds of sheep were scouring up the sandy arroyo. No wonder
Burbank and Lungren and Curtis go mad over the color of this subtle land
of mystery and half-tones and shadows and suggestions. If you haven't
seen Curtis' figures and Burbank's heads and Lungren's marvelously
beautiful Desert scenes of this land, you have missed some of the best
work being done in the art world to-day. If this work were done in
Europe it would command its tens of thousands, where with us it commands
only its hundreds. Nothing that the Pre-Raphaelites ever did in the Holy
Lands equals in expressiveness and p