Down by the river the cottonwoods were still veiled in colorless mist; above were those radiant wings of the morning; and the birds began calling, piping, rustling, as a band of crimson broadened across the gray lips of the east.
Soon we ascended a ridge of the orange-hued mesa I had so long viewed from the Agency grounds. It was my first close-up of the havoc wrought in clay and sandstone by the tearing, aging fingers of the Desert. There were no smooth planes in those tortured hills. They sprawled down to the river-bottoms in petrified agony, the worn [[84]]death-mask of that time when Hell burst from the volcanoes and flowed its molten masses over the plains.
OUTFIT OF A WELL-DIGGER, THE DESERT WATER-WITCH
THE DRYING BED OF THE LITTLE COLORADO RIVER
Showing how the river supplies are inadequate
Slowly we gained the topmost ridge of all, the backbone dividing the river country from the beyond, and looked north over a vast plain, fresh in the morning light, holding the Tolani Lakes. Those wide splotches of bluish green, miles away, seemed as a mirage; but it was water, where one would least expect to find it, the overflow of the great Oraibi Wash, trapped in a flat basin, drying until another flood. The shores were marshy, reed-lined, and invited the migratory birds. Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.
And reflected in the greenish mirror were the dull red walls of Monument Point, the end of the great Red Mesa that stretched northward, rising hugely from the sand dunes and the Desert, flanked and buttressed as some Babylonian city. Perhaps it was a city of the ancients, snuffed out as Pompeii. One longed for time to explore its dead streets. There would be lions, no doubt, slinking down ruined terraces; and rutted pavements; and broken columns to cast long shadows under the autumn moon. And was it lifeless—or only enchanted? One paused and waited for a cry, a rumble of wheels, the far-off blare of a buccina, to wake its spearmen and send flashes along the walls.
This was my first impression, and eleven years after, not having seen it again, I went there over the old route to learn if first impressions fade. I found that the Desert and its visions do not change.