Northward we wended all day, one rugged mesa slope [[57]]and huge flat succeeding another, always rising. After passing Lone Cottonwood Spring, where the water was an excellent imitation of thick gray pea-soup that the horses disdained, we lunched at a delightful place known as Coyote Springs, one of the ten thousand Southwest waterholes so named. In the naming of springs and precious water it would seem that the vocabulary of the pioneers was decidedly limited. But it would have been the same by any other name. A hole scooped in a soft rock and sand hill, fenced with crooked and cracking cottonwood branches, as the Navajo build their corrals, with not a vestige of relieving green within miles of it. All around the sand was packed hard by the flocks of sheep that came to water. Overhead was a broiling sun, and this barren area reflected every bit of the glare and heat that it did not hold as a stove. The air was heavy with the aroma of sheep, and alkali showed ghastly white in the spring’s overflow. Nevertheless, it was an oasis and held water. Here and there were picked and bleaching bones. The coyotes knew its name.
Many buttes not to be seen from the Agency were now in sight. One lumpy mound resembled a coiled snake—Rattlesnake Butte; another was shaped as a pyramid, although no one had heard of Cheops or Chephren; and a third, which had crumbled, was like a huge four-poster bed that some forgotten giant had wrecked.
A bite to eat, and on again, lumbering down the yielding banks of washes, and scrambling up and out of them. Truly a couple of sturdy plugs were required to drag the wagon up those heavy slopes. Providing the traveler has time and patience, and is built with a steel-riveted frame, the old-time farm wagon with three-inch tires is the surest method of making such a journey. It rolls [[58]]and pitches as a squat lugger in a choppy sea, but it gets there.
CROSSING THE DESERT BELOW CHIMNEY BUTTE
THE ORAIBI WASH IN FLOOD-TIME
Where quicksands are ready to engulf a stalled car
While the Desert appears as a level sward, one soon finds that there is no sward to speak of, and that one million tangled hummocks fast follow the first million, each bunch of sparse grass, each growth of greasewood or saltbush having its own protecting hillock of sand. A good road in those days was one that a stout wagon could get over without being wrecked.
It is quite an experience to travel for hours toward a given point marked by a solitary pinnacle, a veritable mountain having sheer sides, and fail to reduce the distance appreciably. The sun was nearly down when we crawled along a valley between two of these monsters. One, named Chimney Butte, a huge truncated cone resting on massive shoulders, was the highest in that country; and the other, Castle Butte, looked like a ruined mediæval stronghold, having a causeway flanked by towers, above which loomed dim embattlements and casements. In the brilliant daylight the height of Chimney Butte is dwarfed by desert distances; and Castle Butte is not always robed in fancy; but it was now twilight, the time when the Desert is most sombre and fanciful, and it was my entrance to that garden of the vanished gods. These two gigantic piles were as the awesome portals of a ruined gateway, the pass to an unknown, mysterious country; and the whole setting, fading into night, gloomy with the menace of silence, held something of the strange unreality of a dream. And came on suddenly the dark and cold.