e ready the mind of the traveller to receive the revelation with
fullest comprehension.

To one approaching who does not know the desert, the motion-picture on
the screen of the car-window is exciting in its mystery. These vast arid
bottomlands of prehistoric Lake Bonneville, girded by mountain groups
and ranges as arid as the sands from which they lift their tawny sides,
provoke suggestive questions of the past.

[Illustration: THE WESTERN TEMPLE THE EASTERN TEMPLE OUTLINES OF THE
WESTERN AND EASTERN TEMPLES, ZION NATIONAL MONUMENT

_From drawings by William H. Holmes_]

In this receptive mood the traveller reaches Lund and an automobile.
The ride to Cedar City, where he spends the night, shows him the
sage-dotted desert at close range. His horizon is one of bare, rugged
mountains. In front of him rise the "Cyclopean steps" in long,
irregular, deeply indented sweeps. The vivid Pink Cliff, which, had it
not long since been washed away from Little Zion, would have added
another tier of color to its top, here, on the desert, remains a distant
horizon. The road climbs Lake Bonneville's southern shore, and, at Cedar
City, reaches the glorified sandstones.

From Cedar City to the canyon one sweeps through Mormon settlements
founded more than sixty years ago, a region of stream-watered valleys
known of old as Dixie. The road is part of the Arrowhead Trail, once in
fact a historic trail, now a motor-highway between Salt Lake and Los
Angeles. The valleys bloom. Pomegranates, figs, peaches, apricots,
melons, walnuts, and almonds reach a rare perfection. Cotton, which
Brigham Young started here as an experiment in 1861, is still grown.
Lusty cottonwood-trees line the banks of the little rivers. Cedars dot
the valleys and cover thickly the lower hills. And everywhere, on every
side, the arid cliffs close in. The Pink Cliff has been left behind, but
the Vermilion Cliff constantly appears. The White Cliff enters and
stays. Long stretches of road overlie one and another colored stratum;
presently the ground is prevailingly red, with here and there reaches of
mauve, yellow, green, and pink.

Cedar City proves to be a quaint, straggling Mormon village with a touch
of modern enterprise; south of Cedar City the villages lack the
enterprise. The houses are of a gray composition resembling adobe, and
many of them are half a century old and more. Dilapidated square forts,
reminders of pioneer struggles with the Indians, are seen here