No; it is not likely that the tribe ever chose this abiding place for its scenery. A sensitive feeling for sound, or form, or color, an impressionable nervous organization, do not belong to the man with the hoe, much less to the man with the bow. It is to be feared that they are indicative of some physical degeneration, some decline in bone and muscle, some abnormal development of the emotional nature. They travel side by side with high civilization and are the premonitory symptoms of racial decay. But are we correct in assuming that because the red man does not see a colored shadow therefore he is blind to every charm and sublimity of nature?
Mountain “view.”
The desert colors.
These mountain-dwellers, always looking out from their height, must have seen and remarked the large features of the desert—the great masses of form, the broad blocks of color. They knew the long undulations of the valley-plain were covered with sharp, broken rock, but from this height surely they must have noticed how soft as velvet they looked, how smoothly they rolled from one into another, how perfectly they curved, how symmetrically they waved. And the long lines of the divides, lessening to the west—their ridges of grease wood showing a peculiar green like the crests of sea-waves in storm—did they not see them? Did they not look down on the low neighboring hills and know that they were pink, terra-cotta, orange-colored—all the strange hues that may be compounded of clay and mineral—with here and there a crowning mass of white quartz or a far-extending outcrop of shale stained blue and green with copper? Doubtless, a wealth of color and atmospheric effect was wasted upon the aboriginal retina; but did it not take note of the deep orange sunsets, the golden fringed heaps of cumulus, and the tongues of fire that curled from every little cirrus cloud that lingered in the western sky?
Looking down to the desert.
The land of fire.
And how often they must have looked out and down to the great basin of the desert where cloud and sky, mountain and mesa, seemed to dissolve into a pink mist! It was not an unknown land to them and yet it had its terrors. Tradition told that the Evil Spirit dwelt there, and it was his hot breath that came up every morning on the wind, scorching and burning the brown faces of the mountain-dwellers! Fire!—he dwelt in fire. Whence came all the fierce glow of sunset down over that desert if it was not the reflection from his dwelling place? The very mountain peaks flared red at times, and in the old days there were rivers of fire. The petrified waves and eddies of those rivers were still visible in the lava streams. Were there not also great flames beneath the sands that threw up hot water and boiled great volcanoes of mud? And along the base of many a cliff were there not jets of steam and smoke blown out from the heart of the mountains?
Drought and heat.
It was a land of fire. No food, no grass, no water. There were places in the canyons where occasionally a little stream was found forcing itself up through the rock; but frequently it was salt or, worse yet, poisoned with copper or arsenic. How often the tribe had lost from its numbers—slain by the heat and drought in that waste! More than once the bodies had been found by crossing bands and always the same tale was told. The victims were half buried in sand, not decayed, but withered like the grass on the lomas.
Desert mystery.