There was something Oriental, fictive in it all, and when at the end of the day I found myself a guest in a pleasant cottage at the Agency, I was fully awake to the contrasts of my "material." My ears, as well as my eyes, were open to the drama of this land whose prehistoric customs were about to pass. For the moment I was inclined to rest there and study my surroundings, but as the real objective of my journey was Ganado, about thirty miles to the west of the Fort, I decided to go on. Ganado was the home of a famous Indian trader named Hubbell, whose store was known to me as a center of Navajo life. Toward this point I set forth a few days later, attended by a young Navajo whose _hogan_ was in that direction, and who had promised to put me on my trail. He was a fine, athletic youth of pleasant countenance, mounted upon a spotted pony and wearing a shirt of purple calico. With a belt of silver disks around his waist and a fillet of green cloth binding his glossy black hair, he was distinctly and delightfully colorful. Our way rose at once to the level of a majestic plateau, sparsely set with pines and cedars, a barren land from which the grass and shrubs had long since been cropped by swarms of sheep and goats. Nevertheless, it was lovely to the eye, and as we rode forward we came upon a party of Navajo girls gathering pinon nuts, laughing and singing in happy abandon, untroubled by the white man's world. They greeted my guide with jests, but became very grave as he pointed out a fresh bear-track in the dust of the trail. "Heap bears," he said to me. "Injun no kill bears. Bears big medicine," and as we rode away he laughed back at the panic-stricken girls, who were hurriedly collecting their nuts in order to flee the spot. At last my guide halted. "I go here," he signed with graceful hand. "You keep trail; bimeby you come deep valley--stream. On left white man's house. You stop there." All of which was as plain as if in spoken words. As I rode on alone, the peace, the poetry, the suggestive charm of that silent, lonely, radiant land took hold upon me with compelling power. Here in the midst of busy, commonplace America it lay, a section of the Polished Stone Age, retaining the most distinctive customs, songs and dances of the past. Here was a people going about its immemorial pursuits, undisturbed by the railway and the telephone. Its shepherds, like the Hittites, who wandered down from the hills upon the city of Babylon two thousand years before the Christian Era, were patriarchal and pastoral. They asked but a tent, a piece of goat's flesh, and a cool spring.