I thanked him for the confidence, knowing that Rainbow Cañon was no place for an invalid. That Agency is nearly always vacant. New superintendents negotiate the trail but twice—ignorantly, going in, and wisely, coming out for ever. Even sure-footed mules have been known to miscalculate at Suicide Corner, and it is claimed that the bones of one such beast, entangled in the wires of his last burden,—a cottage piano,—still furnish a mystic Æolian effect when the wind sweeps below the place where he faltered. The last superintendent had spent forty-eight hours in a tree, evading flood-waters that threatened to carry him on a personally conducted tour through the Grand Cañon itself. I had arranged his relief by telegraphing the nearest offices adjacent to his tree, a mere matter of miles, up and down; and I had no great confidence that anyone would so rapidly arrange mine in similar circumstances. No! Rainbow Cañon sounded good, quite poetical, indeed; but none of it for one who required rest and as little exercise as possible. So, in accord with my request and at my own valuation, based on my inexperience, I was formally transferred as a clerk to an Indian Agency that sits astride the Santa Fe trail—the modern trail connecting the ancient city of Santa Fe with the Pacific, along which pioneers wended in the forties. One week later I had left Washington to make the trek of two thousand five hundred miles to the Painted Desert and—to me—a most desolate siding on the banks of the Little Colorado River in Arizona. II ACROSS THE PLAINS Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days at the foot’s pace of oxen, painfully urging their teams, and with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun for which they steered, and which daily fled them by an equal stride. They had nothing, it would seem, to overtake; nothing by which to reckon their advance; no sight for repose or encouragement; but, stage after stage, only the dead green waste under foot and the mocking, fugitive horizon.—Stevenson: Across the Plains