Cutting the horizon, barrier mountain ranges appear, whose long, restful lines lend a new note of titanic power to the harmony; and every now and again, rock-islands, solitary, abrupt, imposing, tell of other forces silently working through untold ages and leaving behind forms beautiful or merely fantastic. Of all the magnetic elements of the landscape these are the most manifest. But the supreme thing, the over-powering glory, is the majesty of light and the splendor of color that is so all-pervading, all-enfolding in the desert that, before we are aware of it, we become sympathetic with the belief of the indigenous race in sorcery. [Illustration: MESA-LAND _Bolton_] In some far foretime the whole of this vast area was an inland sea. Sand and wind in the long interval since the waters receded have done their part in the task of erosion as effectually as do ocean waves beating upon coast-wise cliffs.[1] The work of these elemental forces is uneven. The softer rock has given way. That which is harder is left sculptured into forms that everywhere invite the imagination. To many of them descriptive names have become permanently attached. Such is Locomotive Rock, lifted high above the road between Casa Blanca and Ácoma in astonishing realism. Most extraordinary is the line of heads and trunks of eleven colossal elephants that may be seen two miles away from Ácoma toward its farm-lands. By wind and sand-blast they have been eroded from the oyster-grey stone to such lifelikeness that fancy grows almost into conviction that here we have the work of forgotten sculptors such as once were bred in Egypt or Chaldæa. Forms like these, in solitudes like these, lead to quick recognition of the source of anthropomorphic worship by the sensitively alert mind of primeval man. Such a portentous figure as that called the Kit Carson monument near Fort Defiance arrests the gaze, bizarre and unlovely though it is. Carved by no human hands, it must have seemed to untutored minds a thing supernatural. In these high altitudes the clear, thin air brings exhilaration of spirit and an unwonted sense of physical well-being that “scorns laborious days” and banishes fatigue. True, at times one may be almost blinded by the shimmering brilliance of “the colored air.” But because the vast stretch of almost treeless earth acts everywhere as a reflector, it is indirect radiation and the lack of shade, rather than direct heat, from which one occasionally needs to seek shelter. With night there comes an indescribably awesome silence—an isolation, an infinity of separation from all one has ever known; but soon the eyes, uplifted to “the floor of heaven thick inlaid with patines of bright gold,” are soothed and quieted out of all alarm, and blessed sleep brings unconsciousness to human spirits which may not too long hold converse with divinity. [Illustration: THE CARSON MONUMENT NEAR FORT DEFIANCE _Bolton_]