Later, we regretted this adventure, for the stupid ammoniacal creature proceeded to dive into the mess cellar, and all food in storage was strangely savored. A matter of this kind, begun in the innocent vacation spirit, may be far-reaching. When we returned with our cargo of peaches, the sewing-circle did not receive us with any fervent warmth. In fact, it was most broadly insinuated that we, having worked a leave, had performed this trick on purpose, to the utter horror and dismay of all unsuspecting persons. Our going down to the river was through that mysterious half-luminous light that follows the darkness before dawn. Then the Desert has an ashen pallor, and a chill and silence that are like winter at whatever season of the year. The bare spaces seem to be covered with snow. There are no calls from birds. One moves in a dead world. At the ford the wheels clattered ominously over flat slabs of rock, and then the horses splashed through shallow pools to the far bank. We turned westward, and the mountains showed their volcanic peaks, grim gray wings in the pallid dawn. They lifted, gaunt and rugged, from a ruff of pines. There had been a fall of snow on those higher levels between the timber and the crests, and the shoulders were draped in white. Now—the very tips of the range were seared with red-gold; and now—each snowbound crest began warming with a rosy glow, as if blood were stirring, pulsing, through the masses of icy lava and eroded stone. And the whole range warmed in a blaze of fresh rose and glinting gold as it turned to greet the sun. Down by the river the cottonwoods were still veiled in colorless mist; above were those radiant wings of the morning; and the birds began calling, piping, rustling, as a band of crimson broadened across the gray lips of the east. Soon we ascended a ridge of the orange-hued mesa I had so long viewed from the Agency grounds. It was my first close-up of the havoc wrought in clay and sandstone by the tearing, aging fingers of the Desert. There were no smooth planes in those tortured hills. They sprawled down to the river-bottoms in petrified agony, the worn death-mask of that time when Hell burst from the volcanoes and flowed its molten masses over the plains. Slowly we gained the topmost ridge of all, the backbone dividing the river country from the beyond, and looked north over a vast plain, fresh in the morning light, holding the Tolani Lakes. Those wide splotches of bluish green, miles away, seemed as a mirage; but it was water, where one would least expect to find it, the overflow of the great Oraibi Wash, trapped in a flat basin, drying until another flood. The shores were marshy, reed-lined, and invited the migratory birds. Ten thousand ducks wheeled above the Lakes that year.