e evolutionary piffle has passed, we'll study out these
prehistoric legends and their racial meaning.

As to the "lack of art," pray wake up! The late Edwin Abbey declared
that the most hopeful school of art in America was the School of the
Southwest. Look up Lotave's mural drawings at Santa Fe, or Lungrun's
wonderful desert pictures, or Moran's or Gamble's, or Harmon's Spanish
scenes--then talk about "lack of _decadent_ art" if you will, but don't
talk about "lack of art." Why, in the ranch house of Lorenzo Hubbell,
the great Navajo trader, you'll find a $200,000 collection of purely
Southwestern pictures.

* * * * *

How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance,
that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest
scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above
10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the
leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine
forests, past Cloudcroft--the sky-top resort--up through the orchard
lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over
the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all
the wonders of Colorado's National Park. With the exception of a very
bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the
southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the
Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and
flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the
tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars
of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down
to California, you can swerve into Grand Canyon, where the gods of fire
and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red
into a swimming canyon of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest
peaks of the Rockies.

In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old
Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor
along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't
take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed;
second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were
allowed.

* * * * *

Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only
from a life-time knowledge of p