Since one cannot know his own country well if he knows no other, a visitor from the east arriving at an altitude of five miles will probably be more conscious than others of drastic changes in the landscape when he first looks down on New Mexico. Instead of the universal green of the east, he will note the earth as an unaccustomed tawny, reddish brown expanse, and this will be its common color through most months of the year. He will note the absence of rivers, but the presence of mountains which generally ring the horizon. He will wonder, after traversing the border counties at the western edge of the Great Plains, at the infrequency of plowlands, and will promptly conclude that New Mexico is one vast, bare desert—an impression that will be corrected rapidly when he visits the dark National Forests where the slim, crowded spruces and firs tower skyward. The visitor from El Paso, as the Chihuahua desert (the name is fairly deserved) slides backward underneath him, will be amazed at the serpentine stripe of vivid verdure below, all completely leveled, and all marked off by geometrical lines and tightly bordered by pale hills where the vegetation is reduced to tiny dots not tall enough to cast a shadow. Still proceeding north, he will presently be above a ninety-mile stretch where the vegetation is so skimpy and the river so closely boxed in by desolate hills that Spanish explorers bestowed on it the sinister name _Jornada del Muerto_—Dead Man’s Journey, which is self-explanatory. But on the other hand, a visitor descending into New Mexico from the northland in wintertime above this same Rio Grande will traverse a featureless jumble of peaks on which the black coniferous forest no longer shows as black at all but, snow-encased, gleams as white as the naked snowfields themselves. And he will find incredible the immense range of climate spanned in a flight only an hour long. The jet traveler approaching from the west beholds the greatest, most spectacular panorama of all, the true wasteland of the desert, with vast blocks uplifted from out of earth’s crust, plateaus dissected by giant empty canyons whose walls are seared to utter nudity by ages of the most intense sunshine on our continent. Here the architecture of nature is all designed on a gigantic scale, and the climate exhibits influences of a mighty ocean, of towering mountain chains, and the range of wandering planetary winds which created the desert. From the altitude of a cruising jet, the distances, the speed, the color, and the light are indescribably exhilarating. Since the traveler arriving from any direction can see for identification only a few species, it will suffice to point out only two of the harbingers of eastern New Mexico, both of which are dominant on that area of the Great Plains: the blue grama grass, which in fall and winter bears the graceful sickle-shaped head, and the small _Yucca glauca_ which cannot be mistaken for anything else.