"Stand with me," writes Mr. James, "on the summit of one of the towering mountains that guard the region, and you will see such a landscape of color as exists nowhere else in the world. It suggests the thought of God's original palette, where he experimented in color ere he decided how to paint the sunset, tint the sun-kissed hills at dawn, give red to the rose, green to the leaves, yellow to the sunflowers.... Look! here is a vast field of alkali,—fine, dazzling white. Yonder is a mural face half a thousand feet high and two hundred or more miles long. It is over a hundred miles away, but it reveals the rich glowing red of its walls, and between it and us are vast patches of pinks, grays, greens, carmines, blue, yellow, crimson, and brown, blending in every conceivable shade in a strange and grotesque yet fascinating manner. It is a rainbow petrified. It is a sunset painted on desert sands."
And here art and archæology may revel. "History—exciting, thrilling, tragic—has been made in the Painted Desert region; was being made centuries before Lief Ericson landed on the shores of Vinland or John and Sebastian Cabot sailed from Bristol.... In the Painted Desert region we find peoples strange, peculiar, and interesting, whose mythology is more fascinating than that of ancient Greece, and for aught we know to the contrary, may be equally ancient; whose ceremonies of to-day are more elaborate than those of a devout Catholic, more complex than those of a Hindoo Pantheist, more weird than those of a howling dervish of Turkistan.... One of the countries comprised in the Painted Desert region is the theme of an epoch ... reciting deeds as brave and heroic as those of the Greeks at Marathon or Thermopylæ; a poem recently discovered after having been buried in the tomb of oblivion for over two hundred years. Here are peoples to whom a written letter is witchcraft and sorcery, and yet who can read the heavens, interpret the writings of the clouds, deserts, and cañons with unerring certainty.... A land it is of witchcraft and sorcery, of horror and dread of ghosts and goblins, of daily propitiations of fates and powers, and princes of darkness and air, at the very thought of whom withering injuries are sure to come."
One is tempted to run on and on in quotation from this fascinating book, which depicts the strange life and the marvellous scenery in the country "where atmospheric colorings are so perfect and so divinely artistic that desolate deserts are made dreams of glory."
Harriet Monroe, the Chicago poet, playwright, and most charming of essayists, who by no means limits her séances with the Muses to those particular hours in which she dons her singing robes, has given this prose-poem picture of a scene on the "Painted Desert":
"The rocks lay in belts as red as flame, yellow as gold, purple as violets, and they seemed to shine of their own light; the City of Rocks, flaming red, and high as mountains; one thousand foot walls sheer to the desert, all carved in needles, spires, towers, castles—the most tremendous thing on earth—there it lay!"
Of the sudden climatic changes of the desert Professor James says:
"I have been almost frozen in its piercing snowstorms; choked with sand in its whirling sandstorms; wet through ere I could dismount from my horse in its fierce rainstorms; terrified and temporarily blinded by the brilliancy of its lightning storms, and almost sunstruck by the scorching power of the sun in its desolate confines.... With my horses I have camped, again and again, waterless, on its arid and inhospitable rocks and sands, and prayed for morning, only to resume our exhausting journey in the fiercely beating rays of the burning sun; longing for some pool of water, no matter how dirty, how stagnant, that our parched tongues and throats might feel the delight of swallowing something fluid. And last year (1902), in a journey to the home of the Hopi, my friends and I saw a part of this desert covered with the waters of a fierce rainstorm as if it were an ocean, and the 'dry-wash' of the Oraibi the scene of a flood that for hours equalled the rapids of the Colorado River. Desert though it is in the main,—barren, wild, and desolate,—here and there within its boundaries are fertile valleys, wooded slopes, and garden spots as rich as any on earth; and the people who make their dwelling-place in this inhospitable land present characteristics as strongly contrasted as those of nature. Here are peoples of uncertain and mysterious origin whose history is preserved only in fantastic legends and traditional songs; whose government is as pure and perfect as that of the patriarchs, and possibly as ancient, and yet more republican than the most modern of existing governments; peoples whose women build and own the houses, and whose men weave the garments of the women, knit the stockings of their own wear, and are as expert with needle and thread as their ancestors were with bow and arrow, obsidian-tipped spear, or stone battle-axe.... Here are peoples of stupendous religious beliefs. Peoples who can truthfully be designated as the most religious of the world, yet peoples as agnostic and sceptic, if not as learned as Hume, Voltaire, Spencer, and Ingersoll. Peoples to whom a written letter is witchcraft and sorcery, and yet who can read the heavens, interpret the writings of the woods, deserts, and cañons with a certainty never failing.... Here are intelligent farmers who for centuries have scientifically irrigated their lands and yet who cut off the ears of their burros to keep them from stealing corn.... Peoples who pray by machinery as the Burmese use their prayer wheels, and who 'plant' supplications as a gardener plants trees and shrubs.... Peoples who are pantheists, sun worshippers, and snake dancers, yet who have churches and convents built with incredible labor and as extensive as any modern cathedral. Peoples whose conservatism in manners and religion surpasses that of the veriest English Tories; who for hundreds of years have steadily and successfully resisted all efforts to 'convert' and change them, and who to-day are as firm in their faiths as ever.... Peoples to whom fraternal organizations and secret societies, for men and women alike, are as ancient as the mountains they inhabit, whose lodgerooms are more wonderful, and whose signs and passwords more complex, than those of any organization of civilized lands and modern times."
One of the most weird and fascinating experiences in Arizona is a visit to "Assamanuda," the "Country of the Departed Spirits." This is the poetic name the Iroquois Indians give to the Painted Desert. This vast plain stretches away with gigantic horizontal columns, the remains of vast layers of sedimentary rock, from which the rains of prehistoric ages have washed away the connecting earth, and the columns are streaked and mottled with scarlet, due, it is said, to the oxidization of particles of feldspar in the granite of which these rocks are composed. Here may be witnessed in its perfection the Fata Morgana. In the air appear palaces, hanging gardens, and temples; fountains and wonderful parks adorned with sculpture; towers and turreted castles; beautiful villas with terraced lawns and cascades of water thrown high in the air; rose gardens and hills, where the deer and the antelope are seen; all these and other visions of loveliness are pictured on the air in a perfection of light and shading. It is not difficult to fancy that one is really gazing into the ethereal world, beyond the pearly gates, and gazing indeed into "the country of departed spirits."
All Northern and Northeastern Arizona are comprised in the region,—Nature's picture gallery. Dr. Newberry, the geologist, who explored all the regions east of the upper Colorado as far as the junction of the Green and the Grand rivers, thus pictures one view of the plateau:
"Directly south the view was bounded by the high and distant mesas of the Navajo country, succeeded in the southwest by the still more lofty battlements of the great white mesa formerly seen from the Moqui pueblos. On these high tablelands the outlines were not only distinctly visible, but grand and impressive at the distance of a hundred miles. Nearly west a great gap opened in the high tablelands through which the San Juan flows to its junction with the Colorado. The distance between the mesa walls is perhaps ten miles, and scattered over it are castle-like buttes and slender towers, none of which can be less than a thousand feet in height, their sides absolutely perpendicular and their forms wonderful imitations of architectural art. Illuminated by the setting sun the outlines of these singular objects come out sharp and distinct with such exact similitude to art that we could hardly resist conviction that we beheld the walls and towers of some ancient Cyclopean city, hitherto undiscovered."