And ride mankind."
Why should one be ridden by things? Why should he enslave himself,—mortgage his entire powers of achievement, such as they are, to pay his bills to the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker? Is not the life more than meat, and the spirit than fine raiment? So he may dream for the moment, gazing meditatively at the water-tank, the station, and the two bungalows that comprise Adamana. Good for that day only, at least, is its contrast to the bewildering din of entrepôts, of ports, of custom-houses, of the general din and warfare of the world he has left behind.
SAN FRANCISCO PEAK, NEAR FLAGSTAFF, ARIZONA
Holbrook, the other station for the Petrified Forests, is twenty miles away. Flagstaff, a very thriving and interesting Arizona town, famous as the site of the Observatory of Prof. Percival Lowell of Boston, is one hundred and fifty miles to the west; and one hour of railroad journey beyond Flagstaff is Williams, the town from which runs the branch railroad to the Grand Cañon over the rolling mesas crowned with the beautiful peaks of the San Francisco mountains, a distance of sixty-three miles, the journey occupying three hours. The nearest town to Adamana station, in which a daily paper is published, is Albuquerque, in New Mexico, which is nine hundred and thirty-five miles to the east, almost as far as from New York to Chicago. The metropolis to which this region looks as its nearest large city is Los Angeles, twenty-six hours distant. So here one is out of the world, so to speak,—
"The world forgetting, by the world forgot,"—
with the vast rolling mesas, with sandstone cliffs offering an uncanny landscape before the eye, with the eternal blue of Arizona skies bending above, with a silence so deep brooding over the desert that one might well feel himself on the moon rather than on earth,—a silence only broken by the semi-daily rush of the long overland trains and occasional freight lines that pass.
John Muir, the famous California naturalist, explorer, and author of valuable books on the Western parks, passed the winter of 1905-06 at Adamana with his two daughters, the Misses Wanda and Helen Muir, and it is he who has discovered the new Petrified Forest which he calls the "Blue Forest"—all the specimens having a deep blue tone, while the other three are simply quarries of red moss, agate, amethyst, topaz, pale rose crystals gleaming against a smoky green ground. The landscape effect of the "Bad Lands" from the little bungalow known as the Forest Hotel is of fairy-like enchantment. A shimmer of rose and gray and gold and emerald, it gleams on the horizon. Lighted by a blazing sunset, it might well be the gates of a New Jerusalem. Anything more exquisite, and more ineffably ethereal in coloring, one might journey far to seek.
"Moreover, something is, or seems,
That touches us like mystic gleams,