The rock is blood red when the sun strikes it, and purple in the shadow.
Perhaps a better climax would have been gained by seeing the Canyon de Chelley first, and progressing to the Bridge, as we should have done had de Chelley not been flooded when we stopped on our way to Kayenta. But anticlimax or not, we loved the rest and relaxation after our strenuous adventure. It was like entering Heaven and finding it unexpectedly gay.
CHAPTER XXII
NORTH OF GALLUP
I CAN still, by shutting my eyes, see thousands of vistas,—little twisting roads clinging tightly to cliffs, tangles of cactus, gray cliff dwellings, pregnant with the haunting sense of life fled recently, deserts ablaze overnight with golden poppies and blue lupin, forests of giant pines backed by blue mountains, snow-peaked; long views of green valleys with cottonwood-bordered streams, miles of silver pampas grass, neat rows of ugly new bungalows in uncompromising sunlight, older wooden shacks with false fronts, dry prairies white with the skeletons of cattle, copper colored canyons dropping from underfoot far into the depths of earth, water-holes with thousands of moving sheep; spiky, waxen yuccas against a night sky;—all this is the West, but inseparable from these mental visions come pungent odors so sharp that I can almost smell them now.
I cannot hope to reproduce the charm and joy of our wanderings, despite mishaps and disasters, because the freshness of mountain altitudes will not drift from the leaves of this book, nor the perfume of sunshine on resin, of miles of mountain flowers, nor the scent of desert dust, dry and untainted by man, the sharp smell of camps,—bacon cooking, wet canvas, horse blankets and leather;—bitter-sweet sage, sweet to the nostril and keen to the tongue, nor the tang of new-cut lumber, frosty nights, and fresh-water lakes, glacier cooled; the reek of an Indian village, redolent of doeskin and dried meats hanging in the sun;—I am homesick for them! And so is everyone who has found good hunting northwest of the Rio Grande.
We again found ourselves on the old Spanish Trail, which leads into Utah through Farmington and a bit of Colorado. Most of the way it was desert, a wicked collection of chuck-holes, high centers, tree-roots, gullies and sand drifts. This was a district once highly respected and avoided, for a few miles further north lay the four state boundaries. Men who find proximity to a state line convenient were twice as well suited with the Four Corners, reckoning arithmetically,—or four times, geometrically. Its convenience probably increased by the same ratio their abandoned character over other abandoned characters who had only two states in which to play hop-scotch with the sheriff. No doubt most of these professional outlaws have disappeared, picked off by the law’s revenge, or by private feud. We should have liked to explore this region further, but sundown was too near for this to be a judicious act, and while we were not always discreet, we were at times.
In late afternoon we looked ahead of us, and saw in this sea of sand two schooners with purple sails full rigged, rosy lighted by the setting sun. They tilted gracefully on a northerly course, the nearer one seeming to loom as high above the other as a sloop above a little catboat. No other landmark lifted above the long horizon save the low hills on our west which at Canyon de Chelley had been east of us. Only when we traveled five, ten, fifteen miles did we realize the magnitude of these giant ships of rock, made so light by the reflection of sand and sun that the sails seemed cut out of amethyst tissue rather than carved of granite. When we passed the first rock, which had seemed so high, it took its proper place, and it became the catboat, while the real Shiprock, we saw, far excelled the other in size and in its likeness to a ship. With the afterglow, the desert became gray and the ship golden, with purple edged sails. At dark the desert became blue-black, and the ship melted into a gossamer mist, looming higher as we neared it. It must be five or six hundred feet high, and so precipitous that nobody has ever scaled its outspread wings, though the Human Fly came from New York for the purpose, and returned defeated.
As we went on in this intensely lonely country, out of the darkness came an odor that a moment before had not been, resembling jasmine or syringa, but fresher than either. We stopped the car, expecting to find ourselves in the midst of a garden. But all around was only greasewood and sage, sage and greasewood. The twigs we plucked to smell broke off brittle in our hands. We drove on, much perplexed.
Just before we reached the town of Shiprock, the air lifted with a new freshness. We sniffed, and raised our heads as horses do. We were reminded of home. It was water! We had not smelled water for two dry days. In an instant we were rolling down shady avenues, and saw lights reflected on a river, and crossed into a town so dense with green grass and arched trees and roses in bloom that it seemed like some old place in New England. Then the mysterious odor, stronger and of unearthly sweetness, came again. It blew from a field of alfalfa in bloom, with the night dew distilling its heavenly freshness. We must have been several miles away when its perfume first reached us in the desert.