Patches of rough gardens cut into the flowered banks gave us our first intimation that the Paradise sheltered an Adam and an Eve. Then we saw wattled huts of willow, the summer hogans of Navajos, airier and more graceful than their mud plastered winter huts. On turning a corner where the receding river had already left a long, fertile island, we came on an encampment of these brightly dressed, alert Arabs, with their keen faces and winged poise. Horses and sheep were pastured near, and under the trees several women had erected frames on which were stretched half-finished rugs. Others, in their full gathered skirts with gay flounces, rode their horses to water as easily as if they wore breeches and puttees. Under the cliffs they looked like tiny dots. This canyon is the favorite summer resort of neighboring Indians, and no wonder. Here for a pleasant season they can forget the arid wastes of the desert in their apricot orchards, and grow without travail their corn and beans and melons.
We had scarcely left this gypsy encampment before we saw mute evidence that the place had been beloved of more than one generation of Indians. Nearly at the top of a rock clustered a few cliff houses, mere crannies in the wall, and all along that unbroken cliff were little, scared shelters, no bigger than mousetraps, watching with scared eyes as no doubt their inmates did long ago, the approaches to their stronghold. Tradition has it that the architects of these houses were ancestors of the Hopis, driven here partly by enemies, partly by drought, but also by the inspiration of their medicine men. It is not strange these empty nests should be arresting sights, dating back to the antiquity when the Hopis could turn into snakes, and the king’s son and his snake bride followed the star which led them to Walpi. They may have inhabited the very eyrie we saw. A tiny, bridal apartment it was, so inaccessible at the top of this slab of rock that only a snake could climb to it. Surely no entirely human feet would dare venture those heights.
CLIFF-DWELLINGS, CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA.
We were struck by the many isolated dwellings we came upon. Unlike the extensive cities at Beta-Takin, at Walnut Canyon, and Mesa Verde, these must have been intended for single families. Between the various groups is a distance sometimes of a half mile, sometimes a mile. The largest and by far the most impressive group in the canyon is Casa Blanca, the White House of some ancient dignitary occupying a commanding position looking far down the valley in both directions. The river cuts deep and narrow here, with shallow islands between. Above it by twenty feet is a bank where crumbling walls, painted with prehistoric pictographs of birds and animals, stand under the shadow of Casa Blanca. The rock is blood red when the sun strikes it, and purple in the shadow. Seventy feet up, the whitewashed walls of this ancient mansion are startlingly, romantically prominent, looking fresh enough to have been painted yesterday.
How the former dwellers reached Casa Blanca is a puzzle. They must have had the aid of ladders and niches in the rock. Today it is completely inaccessible, except to Douglas Fairbanks, who once bounded lightly up its side. A day’s ride down the left fork, overlooking a vale meant for stately pleasure domes, is the Cave of the Mummies. This community of cliff dwellings is so called because one startled explorer found in it seven mummies, in perfect preservation. The cave can be reached by diligent climbing, and aside from all interest in things past, the view down that graceful, twisting valley is worth losing many hours of breath.
We camped that night under a red monolith big enough to bury a nation beneath it. The beauty of that scene is past my exhausted powers of description. The campfire and the river, the smooth cliffs penetrating the black sky with such strength and suavity, were the same essentials as we found at the Rainbow Bridge, yet with all the difference in the world. Grandeur was here, but not the rugged hurly-burly of Titans which overwhelmed and dwarfed us there. Where the San Juan tumbles and froths, and bursts over boulders, struggling and tumultuous, the de Chelley river glides peacefully, widening about pretty shallows and quiet islands. In Nonnezoshe Boco, the rocks are tortured into strange shapes, twisted and wrung like wet clay; here they are planed smooth and not tossed about helter-skelter, but rhythmically repeating the pattern of the stream.
The essential quality of the Canyon de Chelley is not its grandeur, I think, but its rhythm, and the opposite may be said of the Bridge. Those who have seen only de Chelley might well challenge this statement, for a river walled in its entire length by cliffs a quarter to a half mile high can hardly be called less than tremendous. But following as it does the meanderings of a whimsical stream, none of the continuous pictures it makes lacks graceful composition. Here one could spend pleasant months, loafing in those little groves by the river’s brim. Now the Rainbow Trail could never be called pleasant. It is ferocious, forbidding, terrible, desolate, vast,—with relieving oases of garden and stream, but it does not invite to loaf. It is an arduous and exacting pilgrimage. It does not smile, like de Chelley, nor remind one of the gracious and stately landscapes of Claude Lorrain.
CASA BLANCA, CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA.