Painted Desert

“ The horses can make only slow progress. But the air is simply delightful and full of exhilaration, and the particular desert over which those who fare forth for this æsthetic spectacle must pass is the "Painted Desert," whose walls of rocks and mountains, brilliant in a dream of color, recede as they are approached, and thus the entire two days consumed in the journey are a perpetual delight to the eye. ”

“ Far ahead, the edges of forested mountain cut the heat haze with opal winged light above what might have been peaks or clouds.
"'Tis beautiful, Wayland, y'r lone Desert world; but man alive, it's sad! Y' call some the Painted Desert, don't ye? 'Tis like a painted woman, Wayland, vera beautiful, vera fair to look on an' allurin', but a' out o' perspective; an' Wayland, the painted woman is always a bit lonely in the bottom o' her soul spite o' harsh laugh. So is the Desert wi' its harsh silence. Those as like to be shrivelled up wi' thirst, may have it! A'm a plain man!" ”

“ Desert, like a mirage, like a really painted landscape, glowing in red and orange and pink, an immense city rather than a landscape, with towers and terraces and façades, melting into indistinctness as in a rosy mist, spectral but constant, weltering in a tropic glow and heat, walls and columns and shafts, the wreck of an Oriental capital on a wide violet plain, suffused with brilliant color softened into exquisite shades. All over this region nature has such surprises, that laugh at our inadequate conception of her resources. ”

“ This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests. In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two belts. ”

“ Flowers and shrubs are more abundant, birds and animals come and go across your pathway, and there are green valleys with water running upon the surface of the ground. And yet not twenty miles from the green valley you may enter upon the most barren plain imaginable—a place like the Painted Desert, perhaps, where in spots not a living thing of any kind is seen, where there is nothing but dry rock in the mountains and dry dust in the valley. ”

“ It is desert, barren, inhospitable, dangerous, yet thousands of people make it their chosen home. Over its surface roam the Bedouins of the United States, fearless horsemen, daring travellers, who rival in picturesqueness, if not in evil, their compeers of the deserts by the Nile. Down in the deep canyon water-ways of the desert-streams dwell other peoples whose life is as strange, weird, wild, and fascinating as that of any people of earth. ”

“ The roads in the Painted Desert are long and tedious, and the horses drag their weary way over the scorching sands, the wheels of the wagon sinking in, as does also the heart of the sensitive rider who sees the efforts the poor beasts are making to obey his will. ”

“ Thus, according to the Indians, was formed these mountains, which are but a jumble of barren rocks, rising sheer from the level desert; scourged through the centuries by the desert sun, wind and sand—an unfading proof that, unlike man, the Great Spirit painted deeper than the surface. ”

“ The scarcity of water makes journeying on the Painted Desert a grave and serious problem. The springs are few and far between, and only in the rainy season can one rely upon stony or clay pockets that fill up with the precious fluid. In going from Canyon Diablo to Oraibi there are four places where water may be obtained. ”

“ Most people's conception of a desert is a flat, level place of nothing but sand. It is sand instead of water; a desert instead of an ocean. Few deserts conform to this conception,—none, indeed, that I know of in the boundaries of the United States. This Painted Desert Region is wonderfully diversified. There is sand, of course, but much rock, many trees, more canyons, some mountains and lava flows, extinct volcanoes, forests, and pastures. ”

“ Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian's is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven. Void of life it never is, however dry the air and villainous the soil.
This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermilion painted, aspiring to the snow-line. ”

“ The slab was sent East to a museum in Brooklyn. Some scientists explain these black slabs as a fusion of adobe.
As we had not yet learned how to do the Painted Desert, we went forward by the mail wagon from St. Michael's to Mr. Hubbell's famous trading post at Ganado. Mail bags were stacked up behind us, and a one-eyed Navajo driver sat in front. We were in the Desert, but our way led through the park-like vistas of the mast-high yellow pine, a region of such high, rare, dry air that not a blade of grass grows below the conifers. The soil is as dry as dust and fine as flour ”

“ Many of the Petrified Forest visitors are intensely interested in the Painted Desert, lying only a few miles from Adamana. On U. S. Highway 66, six miles from the Rio Puerco, one comes to a sign: “Painted Desert Inn”. A mile from the highway this inn is stationed. But before reaching the building, an abrupt climb brings one to the top of the mesa, and spread out before the eyes is the world’s most magnificent palette, with the colors ready mixed,—The Painted Desert. ”

“ Indeed, the Painted Desert Region, though a part of the United States of America, is a land of peoples strange, unique, complex, diverse, and singular as can be found in any similar area on the earth, and the physical contour of the country is as strange and diverse as are the peoples who inhabit it. ”

“ It is near the sunset time, when the cooling of the desert wind begins and we can view the horizon pierced by the distant mountains and perhaps the many trees on the mountain slopes, while out on the mesas and down in the valleys Nature has painted the floor of the desert with lacework of many kinds of brush, filigree of strange fantastic plants, tall and shaftlike or sinuous and creepy, covered with countless spikes and thorns, armed with innumerable spines or darts ”

“ In places where the marls had been washed away gently, the emigrants found trunks complete, from root to summit, fifty feet in length and three in diameter. All the branches, however, were gone; the tree had been uprooted, transported, whirled and worn by deluges; then to commemorate the victory of the water sprites, it had been changed into stone. The sight of these remnants of antediluvian woodlands made history seem the reminiscence of a child. They were already petrifactions when the human race was born.
The Painted Desert has other marvels. ”

“ Desert mounds, on examination, prove to be sites of long-buried cities, and hundreds, nay thousands of exquisite vessels of clay, decorated in long-forgotten ways, have been dug up from them and sent to grace the shelves of museums and speak of a people long since crumbled to dust. ”

“ The sunset colourings, indeed, force one to turn from the sky, where the brilliant effects are themselves amazing enough, and watch the great dead Desert turn alive with coloured fire no man could possibly invent or dream of. And all through the short dusk, as well as when the stars shine through the later hours of darkness, there are patches of yellow sand and gleaming limestone, almost white, that continue to glow as with internal furnaces just behind their sculptured surface. ”

“ Beneath the sun the horizon, an immense girdle, swept round in unbroken line, pulsating. The turquoise sky hung low, spotless and shimmering, brooding, dipping smoothly down to the horizon and to the long sand-dune running to northeast and southwest. Skirting this dune, reaching to it out of the east, then swerving off to the south beyond, lay the almost unbroken expanse, the desert within the desert, its dead, flat, monotonous brown relieved here and there with alternating sagebrush and cactus and amole, stretching back a distance of a hundred miles to the shack. ”

“ For all time they have stood as over-masters of the Great Desert. Proudly they overlook the far-flung wastes beneath them, where foot-hills die out among black, stony, boulder-strewn plains, and “lakes” of sand, relieved, here and there, by odd-shaped pill-box or church-like kopjes that stand as miniature guardians of the mountains behind them—beyond, right to the faint horizon, nothing but the great dead plains of the desert. ”

“ Seated upon some mound of ruins, we inhaled
[p.85] the fine air of the Desert, inspiriting as a cordial, when star-light and dew-mists diversified a scene, which, by day, is one broad sea of yellow loam with billows of chalk rock, thinly covered by a film-like spray of sand surging and floating in the fiery wind. There, within a mile of crowded life, all is desolate; the town walls seem crumbling to decay, the hovels are tenantless, and the paths untrodden; behind you lies the Wild, before you, the thousand tomb-stones, ghastly in their whiteness ”

“ Their appearance is strikingly different, being wooded and bristling on the sides, shooting up in craggy heights, hoary and white on the uppermost peaks and ridges, as if bitten by the cold and frost, and bared by the bleak winds of the sea. The Great Desert ranges, on the contrary, are naked as nakedness can be, dull, dreary, and dead, smoothed over as velvet, of black and purple hues, and look more like mountains which children might paint than the sterile realities of Old Sahara. ”

“ In the broad wastes open to the wind the sand drifts in hummocks about the stubby shrubs, and between them the soil shows saline traces. The sculpture of the hills here is more wind than water work, though the quick storms do sometimes scar them past many a year's redeeming. In all the Western desert edges there are essays in miniature at the famed, terrible Grand Canon, to which, if you keep on long enough in this country, you will come at last. ”

“ It came over him all of a sudden that he had not grasped the stupendous nature of this desert setting. There was the measureless red slope, its lower ridges finally sinking into white sand dunes toward the blue sea. The cold, sparkling light, the white sun, the deep azure of sky, the feeling of boundless expanse all around him—these meant high altitude. ”

“ Upon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the entire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. The Desert stood on end. As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose upright, towering, and close against his face. It built sudden ramparts to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust. ”

“ The conventional notion of a desert, as a colourless and empty flat of sand, is curiously unlike the thing itself, which is a constantly changing, kaleidoscopic sea of colour, made up of rainbow stripes, black, golden, red, dazzling white, and blue, with every kind of lights and shadows, strange hazes, transparencies, and gleams. ”

“ There is no luxury of turf or anything garden-like in these precincts of earth and running waters and trees. There is no effeminacy in the palm. Severity is the artistic trait of everything in the desert. The long lines of the landscape here are rigid, solemn, sombre; the naked rock of the mountain ranges is stern, worn to the bone by wind and rain and sand; except for the diaphanous and veiling effects of atmosphere and heat, and the cloud and mist conditions that I have mentioned earlier, an austere sublimity governs the horizons and vistas all around. ”

“ Presently, passing through a zone of stunted furze, and dry thin-bladed grass, we emerged into the most fearful desert I ever looked upon—a sea of heights and hollows, dells and ridges, long slopes and precipitous ravines—all of them composed of pure white, hot, drifting sand. The labour of walking was excessive. I longed for the stilts I had seen the day before. Every puff of breeze sent the sand, like dry pungent powder, into our faces, and sometimes we could see it reft from the peaks of the ridges, and blown like clouds of dust far out into the air. ”

“ In the universal pean of gladness which the earth at Eastertide raises to the Lord of Life, the wilderness and the solitary place have part, and the desert then does in truth blossom as the rose. And how comforting are the blossoms of the desert when at last they have come! When the sun has sunk behind the rim of the verdure-less range of granite hills that westward bound my view, and the palpitating light of the night's first stars shines out in the tender afterglow, I love to linger on the cooling sands and touch my cheek to the flowers. ”

“ When there are clouds and great heat the effect is often very brilliant. The colors are intense in chrome-yellows, golds, carmines, magentas, malachite-greens—a body of gorgeous hues upheld by enormous side wings of paler tints that encircle the horizon to the north and south, and send waves of color far up the sky to the cool zenith. Such dawns are seldom seen in moist countries, nor are they usual on the desert, except during the hot summer months. ”