even catch a flying glimpse of the most picturesque Indian race in
America, the Navajos. Their _hogans_ or circular, mud-wattled houses,
are always somewhere near the watering pools and rock springs; and just
when you think you are most alone, driving through the sagebrush and
dwarf juniper, the bleat of a lamb is apt to call your attention to a
flock of sheep and goats scattered almost invisibly up a blue-green
hillside. Blue-green, did you say? Yes: that's another thing you can
unlearn on a flying trip--the geography definition of a Desert is about
as wrong as a definition could be made. A Desert isn't necessarily a
vast sandy plain, stretching out in flat and arid waste. It's as
variegated in its growth and landscape as your New England or Old
England hills and vales, only your Eastern rivers flow all the time, and
your Desert rivers are apt to disappear through evaporation and sink
below the surface during the heat of the day, coming up again in floods
during the rainy months, and in pools during the cool of morning and
evening.

But on a flying trip, you can't learn the secret moods of the Painted
Desert. You can't draw so much of its atmosphere into your soul that you
can never think of it again without such dream-visions floating you away
in its blue-gray-lilac mists as wrapped the seers of old in clairvoyant
prophetic ecstasy. On a flying trip, you can learn little or nothing of
the Arab life of our own Desert nomads. You have to depend on Blue Book
reports of "the Navajos being a dangerous, warlike race" blasted into
submission by the effulgent glory of this, that, and the other military
martinet writing himself down a hero. Whereas, if you go out leisurely
among the traders and missionaries and Indians themselves, who--more's
the pity--have no hand in preparing official reports, you will learn
another story of a quiet, pastoral race who have for three hundred
years been the victims of white man greed and white man lust, of
blundering incompetency and hysterical cowardice.

These are strong words. Let me give some instances. We were having
luncheon in the priests' refectory of the Franciscan Mission; and for
the benefit of those who imagine that missionaries to the Indians are
fat and bloated on three hundred a year, I should like to set down the
fact that the refectory was in a sort of back kitchen, that we ate off a
red table-cloth with soup served in a basin and bath towels extemporized
into serviettes. I