Dominating Flagstaff, as Mont Blanc dominates Chamonix, is the isolated mountain mass, the highest in Arizona, called the San Francisco Peaks, snow-crowned seven or eight months in the year and familiar to every traveler by the Santa Fe’s transcontinental trains. Their clustered half-dozen summits in the form of graceful cones attain a maximum elevation of 12,611 feet above the sea (5600 feet above Flagstaff) and have been a famous landmark from the time of the Spanish conquistadores, who named them, to the present day. The Navajos, as has been told in a previous chapter, assign to the great mountain a divine construction from earth brought up in the Emergence from the underworld, the gods who built it pinning it down poetically with a sunbeam. Matter-of-fact geologists, however, consider the mass as merely an extinct volcano with its top blown off, and find its flanks covered with the congealed lava streams of successive eruptions. The disintegrated surfaces of lava make a fertile bed for the abundant forests, gardens of wild flowers, and natural fields of indigenous grasses that clothe the base and sides up to within a few hundred feet of the craggy top. If you have a taste for mountain climbing and fine outlooks, by all means give a day or two to the San Francisco Mountain. It is of easiest ascent, and the views, full of delight from the moment you leave Flagstaff, attain at the summit a climax that is nothing short of dramatic. The whole of the northern and central Arizona plateau is spread below and about you in such glory of color (if the atmospheric conditions be right) as you have never dreamt of. You can pick out the farther wall of the Grand Cañon and the Buckskin Mountains beyond; the companion volcanic cones of Kendrick, Bill Williams,[70] and Sitgreaves to the westward; the Mogollon Mesa stretching south towards Phoenix; the Verde Valley; the Red Rock Country and Oak Creek Cañon; Sunset Peak;[71] and most striking of all, the glory of the Painted Desert stretching illimitably to the northeast, with the Little Colorado River winding across it to join the Big Colorado 60 miles due north of you. The opportunity to enjoy that unobscured outlook upon the desert from a point over a mile above it, is alone a sufficient reward for the trip. It is like looking on another world, so unearthly are the tones in which that marvelous waste is dyed—indefinite shades of yellow, pink, crimson, brown, cream, green; so striking the sculpturing of its mesas and promontories. Then, too, if you have a spark of romance in your make-up, will it not be an event to tread the very pathways of the gods with whom the Indian fancy has peopled the glades and gorges of this hoary old volcano, as the Greeks peopled Ida—to know that somewhere in these sunny, piny slopes is the fabled house of the Sun God, who, when he would travel, summons a rainbow, as you or I would ring for a taxicab, and to whom, it is said,