The Painted Desert has other marvels. Throughout vast stretches you pass between tinted _mesas_, or tables, which face each other across flat valleys like painted palaces across the streets of Genova la Superba. They are giant splendors, hundreds of feet in height, built of blood-red sandstone capped with variegated marls. The torrents, which scooped out the intersecting levels, amused their monstrous leisure with carving the points and abutments of the _mesa_ into fantastic forms, so that the traveller sees towers, minarets, and spires loftier than the pinnacles of cathedrals. The emigrants were often deceived by these freaks of nature. Beheld from a distance, it seemed impossible that they should not be ruins, the monuments of some Cyclopean race. Aunt Maria, in particular, discovered casas grandes and casas de Montezuma very frequently. "There is another casa," she would say, staring through her spectacles (broken) at a butte three hundred feet high. "What a people it must have been which raised such edifices!" And she would stick to it, too, until she was close up to the solid rock, and then would renew the transforming miracle five or ten miles further on. During this long and marvellous journey Coronado renewed his courtship. He was cautious, however; he made a confidant of his friend Aunt Maria; begged her favorable intercession. "Clara," said Mrs. Stanley, as the two women jolted along in one of the lumbering wagons, "there is one thing in your life which perhaps you don't suspect." The girl, who wanted to hear about Thurstane all the time, and expected to hear about him, asked eagerly, "What is it?" "You have made Mr. Coronado fall in love with you," said Aunt Maria, thinking it wise to be clear and straightforward, as men are reputed to be. The young lady, instantly revolting from the subject, made no reply. "I think, Clara, that if you take a husband--and most women do--he would be just the person for you." Clara, once the gentlest of the gentle, was perfectly angelic no longer. She gave her relative a stare which was partly intense misery, but which had much the look of pure anger, as indeed it was in a measure. The expressions of violent emotion are alarming to most people. Aunt Maria, beholding this tortured soul glaring at her out of its prison windows, recoiled in surprise and awe. There was not another word spoken at the time concerning the obnoxious match-making. A single stare of Marius had put to flight the executioner. In one way and another Clara continued to baffle her suitor and her advocate. The days dragged on; the expedition steadily traversed the desert; the Santa Anna region was crossed, and the Bernalillo trail reached; one hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles and more were left behind; and still Coronado, though without a rival, was not accepted.