It is more of its physiographic conditions in a general way, however, that I would here write. Most people's conception of a desert is a flat, level place of nothing but sand. It is sand instead of water; a desert instead of an ocean. Few deserts conform to this conception,--none, indeed, that I know of in the boundaries of the United States. This Painted Desert Region is wonderfully diversified. There is sand, of course, but much rock, many trees, more canyons, some mountains and lava flows, extinct volcanoes, forests, and pastures. The Grand Canyon runs across its northern borders, and it is the vampire river that flows in that never-to-be-described water-way that drains away the water which leaves this the desert region it is; for the Colorado has many tributaries, and tributaries of tributaries,--the Little Colorado, Havasu (Cataract) Creek, Canyon Padre, Canyon Diablo, Walnut Creek, Oak Creek, Willow Creek, Diamond Creek, and a score or hundred others. Its great mountains are the San Francisco range, on the shoulders of which Flagstaff is located, Mount San Mateo, seen from the Santa Fé train near Grants in New Mexico, and Williams Mountain, west of Flagstaff, at the foot of which the railway traveller will see the town of Williams. Near Flagstaff are a number of extinct volcanoes and great masses of lava flow; from the train at Blue Water to the right a few miles one may see the crater Tintaro--the Inkstand. The Zuni Mountains have many craters, chief of which is the Agua Fria crater, and lava flows from the Zuni Mountains and Mount San Mateo meet in the valley, and one rides alongside them for miles coming west beyond Laguna. South of Canyon Diablo is a wonderful meteoritic mountain, the explanation of whose existence the scientists have not yet determined. From Peach Springs a large meteoric rock was sent to the Smithsonian, and I have one dug out of a hole of its own making in the Zuni Mountains, both of which weigh upwards of a ton. To the east of the Canyon Diablo Mountain is Sunset Pass, familiar to the readers of Gen. Charles King's thrilling Arizona stories, and beyond it to the south are Hell's Canyon,--which does not belie its name,--the Verdi Valley, and the interesting Red Rock Country, where numerous cliff and cavate dwellings have recently been discovered and explored by Dr. Fewkes. Indeed, this whole region is one of cliff and cavate and other forsaken dwellings. Everywhere one meets with them. Desert mounds, on examination, prove to be sites of long-buried cities, and hundreds, nay thousands of exquisite vessels of clay, decorated in long-forgotten ways, have been dug up from them and sent to grace the shelves of museums and speak of a people long since crumbled to dust.