me out of all the riotous intoxication of color in
the Painted Desert.

In fact, you drive across the southern rim of the Painted Desert to
reach the Petrified Forests. You are crossing the aromatic,
sagey-smelling dry plain pink with a sort of morning primrose light,
when you come abruptly into broken country. A sandy arroyo trenches and
cuts the plain here. A gravelly hillock hunches up there; and just when
you are having an eye to the rear wheel brake, or glancing back to see
whether the fat man is on the up or down side, your eye is caught by
spangles of rainbow light on the ground, by huge blood-colored rocks the
shape of a fallen tree with encrusted stone bark on the outside and
wedges and slabs and pillars of pure onyx and agate in the middle.
Somehow you think of that Navajo legend of the coyote spilling the stars
on the face of the sky, and you wonder what marvel-maker among the gods
of medicine-men spilled his huge bag of precious stone all over the
gravel in this fashion. Then someone cries out, "Why, look, that's a
tree!" and the tally-ho spills its occupants out helter-skelter; and
someone steps off a long blood-red, bark-incrusted column hidden at both
ends in the sand, and shouts out that the visible part of the recumbent
trunk is 130 feet long. There was a scientist along with us the day we
went out, a man from Belgium in charge of the rare forests of Java; and
he declared without hesitation that many of these prone, pillared giants
must be sequoias of the same ancient family as California's groves of
big trees. Think what that means! These petrified trees lie so deeply
buried in the sand that only treetops and sections of the trunks and
broken bits of small upper branches are visible. Practically no
excavation has taken place beneath these hillocks of gravel and sand.
The depth and extent of the forest below this ancient ocean bed are
unknown. Only water--oceans and aeons of water--could have rolled and
swept and piled up these sand hills. Before the Desert was an ancient
sea; and before the sea was an ancient sequoia forest; and it takes a
sequoia from six to ten thousand years to come to its full growth; and
that about gets you back to the Ancient of Days busy in his Workshop
making Man out of mud, and Earth out of Chaos.

[Illustration: There is nothing else remotely resembling the Grand Canyon
in the known world, and no one has yet been heard of who has seen it and
been disappointed]

But there i