There were compensations, however. Drives along the mesa ledges and across the wide vacant valleys gave time for planning; and each excursion was an adventure. At five miles the hour a sturdy team does not demand the alertness that an auto compels at twenty. Traffic did not bother one. Only an occasional flock of sheep, a straying pony, or a somnolent freight-team blocked the road. The drowsy hours of midday, filled with the humming noises of the Desert, blessed by sunshine and the wondrous panorama of the Empire, could make up for many frontier irritations. Sometimes one caught vistas into forgotten ages. Far away across the lower plain, as at the edge of a greenish sea, lifted those strange shapes, the Moqui Buttes. I had seen them frozen in a pallid sky; again half lost in the fog and swirls of dust-storms; and again as drifting mounds, with the one farthest west like a flat-headed Sphinx, touching the clouds; and always they had been somnolent headlands, half obscured. But one November day the sun burnt winter gold, and magic touched the Desert. It stretched a placid sea along their coast line of Parrish blue, that richest color of the fairies; and the many peaks were flat against a golden screen. Some lonely galley, heeling under old sails, was all it lacked; and I paused on the mesa-ledge to catch the sound of surf on enchanted beaches. The Coast of Romance! It would have ensnared that wanderer of the Greeks:— My purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die; It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles. There they were, dreaming, awaiting a belated argosy of the years: the farthest Happy Isles, where—who knows?—in the days of the great waters, when the Desert floors were covered, some wily Ulysses may have landed and heard the songs of Circe. XIX OUR FRIENDS, THE TOURISTS He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. “Sir, by so doing, you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to visit the wall of China.” Boswell’s Johnson