Only one who has lived thus removed from the turmoil and petty vanity of cities, apart from careless crowds, unreached by artificiality, can fully realize the brooding mystery, the savage beauty, the power and cruelty of the Desert. One must penetrate its solitudes, stand atop the world to view dead or enchanted cities, pause on the naked brink of chasms leaning over faery valleys, to know the grandeur of this silent country. One must grow weary on its heavy trails, feel its hunger, shrink in its bitter cold, and thirst for the water of the precious hidden springs. Fairly to hear its ominous hush at blazing noon-time, to view the scarlet glory of its sunsets, to stand under its velvet dome at night, lighted by the burning stars, is to have caught a secret from the universe. To have watched Orion’s flaming signal through that crystal atmosphere, to have loved the placid jewels of the Pleiades, is to have received the Desert’s blessing, which is contentment—if not peace. One must spend whole days crossing its sun-baked emptiness, carry-on through the chill of twilight, feel the menace of its dark, and see its wondrous moon burst from black cedars on a mesa edge. One must have known the sigh of the night wind in the brush, heard the chatter of jackals in the snow, felt the sandstorm’s acid lash, and stopped, spellbound, at the sibilant warning of its gliding Indian god. Then to have seen the drifting red-bellied rain-clouds that the Snake priests pray for, the crisp rending lightning at their pouches, the wild strength of arroyos after cloud-bursts, and the deluge of the swift midsummer rains, ending in the soft radiance of double rainbows! One must live as a hermit in the Desert to find its heart. And only one who has done this may somehow feebly understand those bronzed people of whom the desert genii have made fatalists—the solemn, dreaming Indian of the waste lands, whether the Hopi of the mesa heights and kivas, the Pueblo in his mediæval towns, or the Navajo, chanting in his lonely, hidden camp. These know all the splendors, feel all the menace and the mystery, and call the Desert home. Timid, yet uncaring, ever bent on placating some unseen demon, trusting in songs and sorceries, they go their Oriental ways on a vast Occidental stage. The desert spell has touched them, every one.