he
Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range
ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds
flashing phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks
and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."

This spring is about half of the fifty-five miles between Ganado and
Keam's Canyon; and the last half of the trail is but a continuance of the
first: more lilac-colored mesas high above the top of the world, with
the encircling peaks like the edge of an inverted bowl, a sky above blue
as the bluest turquoise; then the cedared lower hills redolent of
evergreens; a drop amid the pumice rocks of the lower world, and you are
in Keam's Canyon, driving along the bank of an arroyo trenched by floods,
steep as a carved wall. You pass the ruins of the old government school,
where the floods drove the scholars out, and see the big rock
commemorating Kit Carson's famous fight long ago, and come on the new
Indian schools where 150 little Navajos and Mokis are being taught by
Federal appointees--schools as fine in every respect as the best
educational institutions of the East. At the Agency Office here you must
obtain a permit to go on into Moki Land; for the Three Mesas and Oraibi
and Hotoville are the _Ultima Thule_ of the trail across the Painted
Desert. Here you find tribes completely untouched by civilization and as
hostile to it (as the name Hotoville signifies) as when the Spaniard
first came among them. In fact, the only remnants of Spanish influence
left at some of these mesas are the dwarfed peach orchards growing in
the arid sands. These were planted centuries ago by the Spanish
_padres_.

The trading post managed by Mr. Lorenzo Hubbell, Jr., at Keam's Canyon is
but a replica of his father's establishment at Ganado. Here is the same
fine old Spanish hospitality. Here, too, is a rare though smaller
collection of Western paintings. There are rugs from every part of the
Navajo Land, and specimens of pottery from the Three Mesas--especially
from Nampaii, the wonderful woman pottery maker of the First Mesa--and
fine silver-work gathered from the Navajo silversmiths. And with it all
is the gracious perfection of the art that conceals art, the air that
you are conferring a favor on the host to accept rest in a little
rose-covered bower of two rooms and a parlor placed at the command of
guests.

The last lap of the drive across the Painted Desert is by all odds the
hardest st