After leaving Acoma, you drive again long and tediously but without serious hindrance, all the way to Gallup. At Gallup there is a hotel, a small frame, frontier type of building. But by the time we reached it we agreed with Mr. X. that it would be more of an experience to spend the night under the stars. How much the beauty of the stars would have tempted us had the hotel been more inviting I am not very sure. Beyond Gallup you run into the Navajo Indian Reservation, your road having ascended rather steeply through parklike woods of cedars, and the altitude again affects both lungs and carburetor, but even if it makes you gasp a little it is an essence of deliciousness as reviving as an elixir of life. You go past the road that leads to the wonderful Canyon de Chelly, but it is impossible for a motor—any kind of a motor, even the littlest and lightest one—to go over it in the early spring, so you continue on until at last, coming out upon a mesa, you see spread below you the Painted Desert! It can be none other. You would be willing to take oath that a great city of palaces in all the colors of the rainbow lies spread before you. It is inconceivable that rock and sand and twilight alone create these turrets and ramparts and bastions of crimson, gold, blue, azure, indigo, purple, and the whole scene immersed in liquid mauve and gold, as though the atmosphere were made of billions and billions of particles of opalescent fluid. And as you stand in silent contemplation an Indian with scarlet head-band rides by on a piebald pony so that there shall be no color unused. [Illustration: ACROSS THE REAL DESERT]