Although the visitor is not allowed to carry away with him a trainload or so of specimens, he may still be permitted a beautiful cross-section of an entire tree trunk, showing all the veins of the wood and the bark, a specimen thin enough to be portable, and worthy a place in any cabinet of curiosities, besides many chips showing all the range of beautiful colors which abound in Chalcedony Park. In this park lies a vast fallen tree trunk that forms a natural bridge over a chasm,—a bridge that seems to be of solid agate. These forests are among the great scenic wonders of the world, and if they were in the heart of the Himalayas or some other especially inaccessible spot, all good Americans would hasten to visit them. But our own wonderful and incomparable scenic grandeur is neglected. These "Petrified Forests" are the marvel of the geologist. What has happened, in all the phenomena of nature, to produce this incredible spectacle? Many scientific men believe that these forests did not grow on the spot where they now would lie prostrate, but were swept down by floods when this region was a vast inland sea, and that they became imbedded in the sand; that then the sea vanished and volcanic eruptions poured over, and the wood was hardened to rock. Again, a flood of water passed over and washed away the sand and silt, and the erosion left these thousands of acres of petrifactions exposed on the surface as now; and thus, after millenniums have passed, we have these quarries of chalcedony and agate, onyx, cornelian, topaz, and amethyst.
Every evening at Adamana disclosed a sky panorama of kaleidoscopic wonder. Afar to the horizon the Bad Lands shimmered in a faint dream of colors under the full moon. The stars seemed to hang midway in the air, and frequent meteors blazed through the vast, mysterious space. Adamana is nine hours from Albuquerque, the metropolis of New Mexico, and five hours distant from Flagstaff, to the west. All the thousands of acres of desert lands about require only water to render them richly productive. But water is unattainable. There are no mountain ranges near enough to produce water storage, and unless the twentieth-century scientists discover some way of creating rain, these arid regions must remain as they are. Yet even here American life and energy and progress are seen. The scattered settlers unite in maintaining public schools six months in the year, and with only from twelve to twenty pupils the teacher is paid from seventy-five to eighty dollars a month,—more than twice the salary paid in the country schools in New England. In the little bungalow here at Adamana, where Mr. Stevenson, the government guardian of the Petrified Forests, makes tourists strangely comfortable during their desert sojourn, one finds a piano, a well-selected little library, and young people whose command of the violin and piano offer music that is by no means unacceptable. The children get music lessons—no one knows how; they are eager for any instruction in language, and acquire French and Spanish in some measure, and in all ways the national ambition is sustained. From Albuquerque comes a daily paper, and only one day behind date the Los Angeles papers arrive. One is not out of the world (alas!) even on the Arizona desert.
It is a new world in itself,—the desert of Arizona. No region on the earth is more diversified, more intensely interesting. This desert comprises mountains and plains; it contains that one supreme scenic wonder of the world, the Grand Cañon; in it are Cañon Diablo and the Meteorite Mountain. Within its area also is the "Tonto Basin,"—an incalculable chaos of isolated and unrelated cliffs, and crags of mountains peaks that have lost their mountains, and general wreck and ruin. One might fancy that at the end of creation, when the universe itself was completed, all the chips and fragments and débris in general were hurled into the Tonto Basin,—only that, of course, the universe was never "made," but is always in the making; only that the physical configuration of the entire earth is always in process of transformation into new aspects, and nowhere is this progress of the ages more extraordinarily in evidence than in Arizona.
Leaving the Petrified Forest for the Grand Cañon, one has a wonderful journey of six hours to Williams, and thence three hours over the branch road to Bright Angel, where the new and magnificent hotel, "El Tovar," captivates the travellers, and from which a stage runs to Grand View, thirteen miles away, where Vishnu Temple, the Coliseum, Solomon's Temple, and other wonders of the marvellous sandstone architecture, in the depths of the Grand Cañon are viewed.
In waiting for the train on the branch road running from Williams to the Grand Cañon over the beautiful San Franciscan mountains, the hour of waiting at Williams is made a delight by a most unique and interesting curiosity shop under the splendid Harvey management, where all kinds of natural curiosities and Indian and Mexican things are shown. The walls are hung with bright-hued blankets and rugs, the ceiling is decorated and draped, easy-chairs and sofas abound, and these tend to make the journey a kind of royal progress.
In 1540 Pedro de Tovar, one of the officers who accompanied Coronado through his great expedition, passed through Arizona. Even then an extinct civilization was already old. The ruins of the dwellings of those prehistoric people abound near Flagstaff. In the recesses of Walnut Cañon there are found cliff-dwellings in great numbers. "Some of these are in ruins, and have but a narrow shelf of the once broad floor of solid rock left to evidence their extreme antiquity. Others are almost wholly intact, having stubbornly resisted the weathering of time." Nothing but fragments of pottery now remain of the many quaint implements and trinkets that characterized these dwellings at the time of their discovery.
"Fixed like swallows' nests upon the face of a precipice, approachable from above or below only by deliberate and cautious climbing, these dwellings have the appearance of fortified retreats rather than habitual abodes. That there was a time in the remotest past when warlike peoples of mysterious origin passed southward over this plateau is generally credited. And the existence of the cliff-dwellings is ascribed to the exigencies of that dark period when the inhabitants of the plateau, unable to cope with the superior energy, intelligence, and numbers of the descending hordes, devised these unassailable retreats. All their quaintness and antiquity cannot conceal the deep pathos of their being, for tragedy is written all over these poor hovels hung between earth and sky. Their builders hold no smallest niche in recorded history. Their aspirations, their struggles, and their fate are all unwritten, save on these crumbling stones, which are their sole monument and meagre epitaph. Here once they dwelt. They left no other print on time."
Flagstaff is a pleasant mountain town some seven thousand feet above sea level, and is particularly fortunate in being the site of the Lowell Observatory, founded by Professor Percival Lowell of Boston, which brings eminent astronomers and scientists to the place. In the Lowell Observatory some of the best work in modern science is being accomplished, and Professor Lowell and his staff have for some years been devoting themselves to the special study of Mars. Flagstaff was selected for the site of the observatory on account of the singularly clear and still air of Arizona. It is an atmosphere almost without vibration. Never were distances more curiously deceiving to the eye than in Arizona. A point that is apparently only a few yards away may be, in reality, at a distance of two miles. Professor Lowell and his staff have, therefore, exceptional facilities for their work, and Mr. Carl Otto Lampland, the stellar photographer of the staff, has taken impressions of Mars that seem to leave little doubt in the minds of experts that canals on that planet reflect themselves by the camera. This achievement is recognized by astronomers everywhere as marking an epoch in the study of Mars and as fairly closing the argument regarding the possibility of canals on that body by bringing their construction there as an unquestionable fact. It was Schiaparelli, the Italian astronomer, who first observed what he believed were canals on Mars. His report was received with incredulity; but his theory has been so reinforced and supported by actual results of observations since then that it is now generally accepted. Early in the decade of 1880-90 Professor Lowell began a special study at Flagstaff with his fine twenty-four-inch telescope, but it was in May, 1905, that the first results of real significance were obtained. The light about Mars is said to be faint, and the vibrations in the air, though less in Arizona than is usual elsewhere, still produced disturbing effects on the plate. It is said that Mr. Lampland overcame this difficulty after a long series of experiments, "by using a diaphragm on the telescope, cutting down the aperture from twenty-four inches to twelve inches, as a rule. Though this diaphragming of a photographic lens is not new, this was the first time it was applied to a glass as large as twenty-four inches in diameter and for such faint objects. Hitherto astronomers have been more concerned with availing themselves of the light-gathering power of the large lenses. It was a distinct advance, and is the one step to which the largest share of the credit is due of successfully photographing the canals."
In the vestibule of the Institute of Technology in Boston were shown in the spring of 1906 a number of these photographs. To the uninitiated they merely presented a black ground with white lines faintly defined. Professor Lowell says that the special significance of the photographs lies in the fact that they corroborate the results shown by other photographers of Mars, and that they also corroborate the methods. That the sensitive plate of the camera will record a star never visible through even the strongest glass, and thus prove its existence, is a wonderful fact in stellar photography.
Cañon Diablo is one of the volcanic phenomena of Arizona,—a narrow chasm some two hundred and fifty feet deep, several miles long, and five or six hundred feet wide, which the Santa Fé road crosses on a wonderful steel spider-web bridge a few miles before reaching Flagstaff. It is one of the curious things for which the tourist is watching. For so intensely interesting is the entire journey westward after leaving La Junta in Colorado, that the traveller who realizes the wonderland through which he is passing is very much on the alert for the landscape.