Through Our Unknown Southwest / The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert

by Agnes C. Laut

It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams—a mist shot with the gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying prone, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as the faces of god-like races ever are.

You wind round a juniper grove—"cedars of Lebanon," the Old Testament would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds—only they call them "herders," fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms shade the ground. And the maidens are there, "drawing water from the well," carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers, hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled.

You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,—and a winged horseman spurs past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse—that is why the Oriental always called an enemy "a dog." Pottery makers look up from their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote passerby. The basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye; and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools.

Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.

You have turned a spur of the Mountains, dipped into a valley, come up on the Mesa into the sunlight, and there It is—the eternal mountains with their eternal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtain where you may paint your own pictures of fancy, and in the midst of the great amphitheater rises an island rock; and on the island rock is a grotto; and in the grotto is the figure of the Mother of Christ—in purplish blue, of course, as betokens eternal purity—and below the island of rock in the midst of the amphitheater something swims into your ken that is neither of Heaven nor earth. White, glaringly white as the very spotlessness of Heaven, twin-towered as befitting the dual nature of man, flesh and spirit; pointed in its towers and minarets and belfries, betokening the reaching of the spirit of Man up to God; lions between the arches of the roofed piazzas, as betokening the lion-hearted spirit of Man fighting his enemies of Flesh and Spirit up to God!

Palms before arched white walls shut out the world—Peace and Seclusion and Purity!

You dip into a valley, the scent of the cedars in your nostrils and lungs, the peace of God in your heart. Then you come up to a high mesa and you see the vision of the white symbol swimming between earth and sky but always pointing skyward.

Where are you, anyway: in Persia amid floating palaces, on the Nile, approaching the palaces of Allahabad in India, or coming up to Moorish minarets and twin towns of the Alhambra in Spain?

Believe me, you are in neither Europe, Asia, nor Africa. You are in a much despised land called "America," whence wealth and culture run off to Europe, Asia and Africa, to find what they call "art" and "antiquity."

It is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been falling in torrents. Rain is not supposed to fall in the Desert, but it has been coming down in slant torrents and the sky is reflected everywhere in the roadside pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for the altitude is only 2,000 feet; too high to be languid, too low for the sting of autumn frosts.