Three of us had spent days of incomparable interest and pleasure visiting the chief monuments of Mesa Land, Zuñi and Tusayán; Inscription Rock[2] with its autograph record of heroic adventurers; the Cañon de Chelly and the Cañon del Muerto, where prehistoric pueblos are built, on rocky shelves or in natural caves, so high above the wet floor of the river that they look like toy villages. From the limitless champaign we had seen solitary mesas lifted up like no other mountain architecture on earth. They varied in size from little islands to great table lands ten miles long and more. To the traveller’s surprise some of these “islands” prove to be peninsulas. This was the case at Hopi. A raised topographic map disclosed the fact that the three mesas (table lands) whereon were built the Seven Cities of Tusayán (Hopi) in the dateless centuries before the coming of Columbus, are really long, irregular fingers pushing out from a single enormous plateau. They are separated from one another by miles of sage-grown plain through which run deep washes, torn by violent streams in periodic seasons of storm, but now as dry and empty of life as extinct craters. The highest point, from which these fabled cities rise in picturesque dignity, is only seven or eight hundred feet above the plain; but we are told that on its farthest rim to the north, this plateau drops a sheer three thousand feet. Long rocky tongues such as these, high and rugged, difficult of access and therefore easily defended, and, moreover, commanding far views of the deep, wide valleys stretching between the highlands, offered to the agricultural Indian a natural fortress of defense from his hereditary foe, who roamed the plains whithersoever the hunting of the buffalo willed that he should go. Like all the semi-desert country, the valley land seems level until you begin to traverse it. Then the roughness and the strange uplifts and hollows suggest a world still in the making, an emergence from chaos, left but never conquered. But not all is desert. Much beautiful wooded country lies scattered through the Navajo reservation on the way to Hopi Land. On the high plateaus, tall pines and cedars, interspersed with a lower growth of oaks, give the nomad Navajo ample room for his wandering flocks and a hidden shelter for his solitary hogan (hut) whether it be of adobe or of brushwood. No undergrowth obscures the long vistas through the forest, but a carpet of luxuriant grass dotted with brilliant flowers gives pasturage for the woolly flock that provides both clothing and food for the Navajo. One of our keenest memories will always be of the deliciously aromatic scent of cedar burning in these hogans. Rising like incense through the limpid air, it suggested ancient smokes from primeval altars, kindled by the torch snatched from the Fire-God by Coyote.