* * * * *

At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest
teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from
Ganado for Keam's Canyon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert
travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with
you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied
passers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a
system that must surely be changed, not because the public love Mr.
Hubbell "less, but more."

The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac
light--tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued
glory--with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through
notches of the painted peaks. _Hogan_ after _hogan_, with sheep corrals
in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys and girls were driving the
sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you
drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the
Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the
summit--the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you
are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon
miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented
bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the
appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender
light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an
incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin
to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests.
In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab
Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the
Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two
belts.

Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you
hardly realize it till you slither down a sand bank and find yourself
between the yellow pumice walls of a blind _cul-de-sac_ in the
rock--nooning place--where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out
of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone.
Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have
fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the
walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in t