Peoples to whom fraternal organizations and secret societies, for men and women alike, are as ancient as the mountains they inhabit, whose lodge rooms are more wonderful, and whose signs and passwords more complex than those of any organization of civilized lands and modern times. Peoples industrious and peoples studiously lazy, honest and able in thievery, truthful and consummate liars, cleanly and picturesquely dirty, interesting and repulsively loathsome, charming and artistically hideous, religious and cursedly wicked, peaceful and unceasingly warlike, lovers of home and haters of fixed habitations. Here are peoples who dwell upon almost inaccessible cliffs, peoples of the clouds, and, on the other hand, peoples who dwell in canyon depths, where stupendous walls, capable of enclosing Memphis, Thebes, Luxor, Karnak, and all the ruins of ancient Egypt, are the boundaries of their primitive residences. The Painted Desert Region is a country where rattlesnakes are washed, prayed over, caressed, carried in the mouth, and placed before and on sacred altars in religious worship. Where the worship of the goddess of reproduction with all its phallic symbolism is carried on in public processionals, dances, and ceremonials by men, women, maidens, and children without shameful self-consciousness, yet where dire penalties, even unto mutilation and death, are visited upon the unchaste. Where polygamy has been as openly practised as in the days of Abraham, and possibly from as early a time, and where to-day it is as common to see a man who, openly, has two or more wives, as in civilized lands it is common to see him with but one. And yet it is a land in which polygamy is expressly forbidden by United States law, and where numbers of arrests have been made for violation of that law. Where religious rites are performed, so mystic and ancient that their meaning is unknown even to the most learned of those who partake in them. Indeed, the Painted Desert Region, though a part of the United States of America, is a land of peoples strange, unique, complex, diverse, and singular as can be found in any similar area on the earth, and the physical contour of the country is as strange and diverse as are the peoples who inhabit it. It is a land of gloriously impressive mountains, crowned with the snows of blessing and bathed in a wealth of glowing colors, changing hues, and tender tints that few other countries on earth can boast. On its eastern outskirt is a portion of one of the largest cretaceous monoclines in the world, and near by is a natural inkstand, half a mile in circumference, from which, centuries ago, flowed fiery, inky lava which has now solidified in intensest blackness over hundreds of miles of surrounding country.