this way to shorten the weeks of waiting.
Anyhow, here I was in Gallup, a drab little town which would have been a
horror to my bride-elect.

One of the reasons for my being in New Mexico I am sure about. With the
prospect of having some sort of an apartment in the city and a cabin at
the camp, I was in the market for Navajo rugs, and silver, and Hopi
pottery. It was in pursuit of these (and of literary material) that I
mounted the stage the next morning and set off up the sun-lit valley to
the north.

In leaving Gallup behind, my spirits rose. I wished that Zulime might
have shared this strange landscape with me. On the right a distant,
dimly-blue wall of mountains ran, while to the west rolled high,
treeless hills, against which an occasional native hut showed like a
wolf's den, half-hid among dwarf pinon trees and surrounded by naked
children and savage dogs.

At intervals we came upon solitary shepherds tending their piebald
flocks, as David and Abner guarded their father's sheep in Judea. That
these patient shepherds, watching their lean herds, these Deborahs
weaving their bright blankets beneath gnarled branches of sparse cedar
trees, should be living less than forty-eight hours from Chicago, was
incredible, and yet here they were! Their life and landscape, though of
a texture with that of Arabia, were as real as Illinois, and every mile
carried me deeper into the silence and serenity of their tribal home.

Brown boys, belted with silver and wearing shirts of gay calico, met us,
riding their wiry little ponies with easy grace. Children, naked, shy as
foxes, arrested their play beside dry clumps of sage-brush and stared in
solemn row, whilst their wrinkled, leathery grand-sires hobbled out,
cupping their thin brown hands in prayer for tobacco.

There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of
the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I
was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as
my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs
were about to pass. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and
study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was
Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on.

Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store
was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set
forth a few days later, attended by a young