That which is normal elsewhere cannot find its kindred in the Desert. Here the scale was made by giants. Nothing is small save those who enter it without respect. Left to it, crumbling, dust-covered, ancient, are the massive properties of splendid prehistoric plays. Its geology, a mosaic of the mesas, an open book in the shattered cañons, speaks of the twilight before Babylon. The shepherds on Chaldean hills were like its people of to-day. In this land, so strangely similar to His, one thinks of Christ in Judæa, at a time when cliff-dwellers, curious half-human pygmies, fought over this unknown continent and honeycombed its enormous cañon walls, as unmindful of their Divine contemporary as their descendants are. Here one may view the remnants of a civilization still in decadent being, clinging to the pueblos that have little changed since the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan dominated their Mongol brothers, and rude gentlemen of England gathered at Runnymede to sign the Charter, the spirit of which now rules them too. One comes, like Crusoe, upon historic footprints, younger signs,—not quite four hundred years old,—the first white man’s record in the valley of the Rio Grande, and may trace them across the Desert and through the cañons to the Crossing of the Fathers. The dramatic entry of the Spanish marks a page as colorful and as stirring as any in history. Seeking new lands and treasure, they came from the South. One can picture their departure from Compostela in February 1540, a long train of adventurers making a new crusade. Romancists and friars, mercenaries, captains, Spanish braves. At their head, the great Conquistador. Swords and crosses beat against the savage desert shields; litanies sounded above the savage desert chants. Their gestures were of bravado, yet upon their lips were the Ave and the Sanctus. They struggled for a legend, found Cibola but a fable, yet were not discouraged. Supermen these, not to have feared the desert gods, not to have quailed before the sinister welcome of the empty desert spaces. From the Sangre de Christos to that awesome Cañon of the West they marched and countermarched, they prayed and fought, leaving their record deep in great El Morro, on the King’s Road to Acoma. Then the days of the Mission Fathers; the revolt of 1680; the massacre of the padres; the red calendar of the now drowsy pueblos along the Rio Grande. After that, a long silence in the Desert, broken only by sound of tom-toms and wild exultant chants, until the coming of De Vargas to reclaim this empire for his king. Then the Mission bells were hung, those very bells that sound at Acoma and San Felipe to this day.