CHAPTER VI
ACROSS THE PAINTED DESERT THROUGH NAVAJO LAND
When you leave the Enchanted Mesa at Acoma, to follow the unbeaten trail on through the National Forests, you may take one of three courses; or all three courses if you have time.
You may strike up into Zuñi Land from Gallup. Or you may go down in the White Mountains of Arizona from Holbrook; and here it should be stated that the White Mountains are one of the great un-hunted game resorts of the Southwest. Some of the best trout brooks of the West are to be found under the snows of the Continental Divide. Deer and bear and mountain cat are as plentiful as before the coming of the white man—and likely to remain so many a day, for the region is one of the most rugged and forbidding in the Western States. Add to the danger of sheer rock declivity, an almost desert-forest growth—dwarf juniper and cedar and giant cactus interwoven in a snarl, armed with spikes to keep off intruders—and you can understand why some of the most magnificent specimens of black-tail in the world roam the peaks and mesas here undisturbed by the hunter. Also, on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit almost as wonderful prehistoric dwellings as in the Frijoles of New Mexico, or the Mesa Verde of Colorado. It is here you find Montezuma's Castle and Montezuma's Well, the former, a colossal community house built on a precipice-face and reached only by ladders; the latter, a huge prehistoric reservoir of unknown soundings; both in almost as perfect repair as if abandoned yesterday, though both antedate all records and traditions so completely that even when white men came in 1540 the Spaniards had no remotest gleaning of their prehistoric occupants. Also on your way into the White Mountains, you may visit the second largest natural bridge in the world, a bridge so huge that quarter-section farms can be cultivated above the central span.
Or you may skip the short trip out to Zuñi off the main traveled highway, and the long trip south through the White Mountains—two weeks at the very shortest, and you should make it six—and leave Gallup, just at the State line of Arizona, drive north-west across the Navajo Reserve and Moki Land to the Coconino Forests and the Tusayan and the Kaibab, round the Grand Cañon up towards the State lines of California and Utah. If you can afford time only for one of these three trips, take the last one; for it leads you across the Painted Desert with all its wonder and mystery and lure of color and light and remoteness, with the tang of high, cool, lavender blooming mesas set like islands of rock in shifting seas of gaudy-colored sand, with the romance and the adventure and the movement of the most picturesque horsemen and herdsmen in America. It isn't America at all! You know that as soon as you go up over the first high mesa from the beaten highway and drop down over into another world, a world of shifting, shimmering distances and ocher-walled rampart rocks and sand ridges as red as any setting sun you ever saw. It isn't America at all! It's Arabia; and the Bedouins of our Painted Desert are these Navajo boys—a red scarf binding back the hair, the hair in a hard-knotted coil (not a braid), a red plush, or brilliant scarlet, or bright green shirt, with silver work belt, and khaki trousers or white cotton pantaloons slit to the knee, and moccasins, with more silver-work, and such silver bridles and harnessings as would put an Arab's Damascus tinsel to the blush. Go up to the top of one of the red sand knobs—you see these Navajo riders everywhere, coming out of their hogan houses among the juniper groves, crossing the yellow plain, scouring down the dry arroyo beds, infinitesimal specks of color moving at swift pace across these seas of sand. Or else you see where at night and morning the water comes up through the arroyo bed in pools of silver, receding only during the heat of the day; and moving through the juniper groves, out from the ocher rocks that screen the desert like the wings of a theater, down the panting sand bed of the dead river, trot vast herds of sheep and goats, the young bleat—bleating till the air quivers—driven by little Navajo girls on horseback, born to the saddle, as the Canadian Cree is born to the canoe.
If you can't go to Zuñi Land and the White Mountain Forest and the Painted Desert, then choose the Painted Desert. It will give you all the sensations of a trip to the Orient without the expense or discomfort. Besides, you will learn that America has her own Egypt and her own Arabia and her own Persia in racial type and in handicraft and in antiquity; and that fact is worth taking home with you. Also, the end of the trip will drop you near your next jumping-off place—in the Coconino and Tusayan Forests of the Grand Cañon. And if the lure of the antique still draws you, if you are still haunted by that blatant and impudent lie (ignorance, like the big drum, always speaks loudest when it is emptiest), "that America lacks the picturesque and historic," believe me there are antiquities in the Painted Desert of Arizona that antedate the antiquities of Egypt by 8,000 years. "The more we study the prehistoric ruins of America," declared one of the leading ethnological scholars of the world in the School of Archæology at Rome, "the more undecided we become whether the civilization of the Orient preceded that of America, or that of America preceded the Orient."
For instance, on your way across the Painted Desert, you can strike into Cañon de Shay (spelled Chelly), and in one of the rock walls high above the stream you will find a White House carved in high arches and groined chambers from the solid stone, a prehistoric dwelling where you could hide and lose a dozen of our national White House. Who built the aerial, hidden and secluded palace? What royal barbaric race dwelt in it? What drove them out? Neither history nor geology have scintilla of answer to those questions. Your guess is as good as the next; and you haven't to go all the way to Persia, or the Red Sea, or Tibet, to do your guessing, but only a day's drive from a continental route—cost for team and driver $14. In fact, you can go into the Painted Desert with a well-planned trip of six months; and at the end of your trip you will know, as you could not at the beginning, that you have barely entered the margin of the wonders in this Navajo Land.
To strike into the Painted Desert, you can leave the beaten highway at Gallup, or Holbrook, or Flagstaff, or the Grand Cañon; but to cross it, you should enter at the extreme east and drive west, or enter west and drive east. Local liverymen have drivers who know the way from point to point; and the charge, including driver, horses and hay, is from $6 to $7 a day. Better still, if you are used to horseback, go in with pack animals, which can be bought outright at a very nominal price—$25 to $40 for ponies, $10 to $20 for burros; but in any case, take along a white, or Indian, who knows the trails of the vast Reserve, for water is as rare as radium and only a local man knows the location of those pools where you will be spending your nooning and camp for the night. Camp in the Southwest at any other season than the two rainy months—July and August—does not necessitate a tent. You can spread your blankets and night will stretch a sky as soft as the velvet blue of a pansy for roof, and the stars will swing down so close in the rare, clear Desert air that you will think you can reach up a hand and pluck the lights like jack-o'-lanterns. Because you are in the Desert, don't delude yourself into thinking you'll not need warm night covering. It may be as hot at midday as a blast out of a furnace, though the heat is never stifling; but the altitude of the various mesas you will cross varies from 6,000 to 9,000 feet, and the night will be as chilly as if you were camped in the Canadian Northwest.
Up to the present, the Mission of St. Michael's, Day's Ranch, and Mr. Hubbell's almost regal hospitality, have been open to all comers crossing the Desert—open without cost or price. In fact, if you offered money for the kindness you receive, it would be regarded as an insult. It is a type of the old-time baronial Spanish hospitality, when no door was locked and every comer was welcomed to the festive board, and if you expressed admiration for jewel, or silver-work, or old mantilla, it was presented to you by the lord of the manor with the simple and absolutely sincere words, "It is yours," which scrubs and bubs and dubs and scum and cockney were apt to take greedily and literally, with no sense of the noblesse oblige which binds recipient as it binds donor to a code of honor not put in words. It is a type of hospitality that has all but vanished from this sordid earth; and it is a type, I am sorry to write, ill-suited to an age when the Quantity travel quite as much as the Quality. For instance, everyone who has crossed the Painted Desert knows that Lorenzo Hubbell, who is commonly called the King of Northern Arizona, has yearly spent thousands, tens of thousands, entertaining passing strangers, whom he has never seen before and will never see again, who come unannounced and stay unurged and depart reluctantly. In the old days, when your Spanish grandee entertained only his peers, this was well; but to-day—well, it may work out in Goldsmith's comedy, where the two travelers mistake a mansion for an inn. But where the arrivals come in relays of from one to a dozen a month, and issue orders as to hot water and breakfast and dinner and supper and depart tardily as a dead-beat from a city lodging house and break out in complaints and sometimes afterwards break out in patronizing print, it is time for the Mission and Day's Ranch and Mr. Hubbell's trading posts to have kitchen quarters for such as they. In the old days, Quality sat above the salt; Quantity sat below it and slept in rushes spread on the floor. I would respectfully offer a suggestion as to salting down much of the freshness that weekly pesters the fine old baronial hospitality of the Painted Desert. For instance, there was the Berlin professor, who arrived unwanted and unannounced after midnight, and quietly informed his host that he didn't care to rise for the family breakfast but would take his at such an hour. There was the drummer who ordered the daughter of the house "to hustle the fodder." There was the lady who stayed unasked for three weeks, then departed to write ridiculous caricatures of the very roof that had sheltered her. There was the Government man who calmly ordered his host to have breakfast ready at three in the morning. His host would not ask his colored help to rise at such an hour and with his own hands prepared the breakfast, when the guest looked lazily through the window and seeing a storm brewing "thought he'd not mind going after all."
