Last year, fate designed that we camp at exactly the same spot. The two wagons came to rest at about the same place where the ambulance stood, and exactly the same wind and sand-storm blew up before we had been there half an hour. I had with me a long, eight-feet-high strip of canvas belonging to a very large circular tent. To ward off the force of some part of the storm we stretched this canvas from the trunk of one cottonwood tree to another, and moved our camp to the sheltered side. That was an insult to the powers of the storm. The wind fairly howled with rage, and pulled and tugged and flapped that canvas in a perfect fury of anger. Then as we huddled in its shelter, a sudden jerk came, and up it was ripped, from top to bottom, in a moment, and the loose ends went wildly flying and flapping every way. In the blowing sand I fled with the ladies to Mr. Voth's ever-hospitable house, but it was as hot as--well! no matter--in there. Outside, the cottonwoods were bowed over in the fury of the wind, and the sand went flying by in sheets. It was easy then to understand the remark of one experienced in the ways of the Painted Desert Region: "If you ever buy any real estate here, contract to have it anchored, or you'll wake up some morning and find it all blown into the next county." The flying sand literally obliterated every object more than a few feet away. Now in this last case I had the pleasure--as peculiar a pleasure as it is to watch the coming of a hurricane at sea--to see the oncoming of this storm. We were enjoying perfect calm. Suddenly over the Oraibi mesa there came a great brown mass that stretched entirely across the country. It was the tawny sand risen in power and majesty to drive us from its lair. It was so grand, so sublime, so alive, that just as I instinctively rush to my camera at sight of an interesting face, I dashed towards it to secure a photograph of this new, gigantic, living manifestation. But in its fierce fury it swept upon us with such rapidity that I was too late. We were covered with it, buried in it. As darkness leaps upon one and absorbs him, so did this storm absorb us. In an hour or so its greatest fury subsided; then we thought we would build our camp-fire and proceed to our regular cooking. How the wind veered and changed, and changed again as soon as the fire began to ascend. That is a point to watch in building a camp-fire. Be sure and locate it so that its smoke won't blow upon you when you sit down to eat. In this case, however, it would not have mattered. In my notebook I read: "We have changed the camp-fire three times, and no matter where we put it, the smoke swoops down upon us. Even now while I write I am half blinded by the smoke, which ten minutes ago was being blown in the opposite direction." So that if these few pages have an unpleasant odor of camp-fire smoke about them, the reader must charge it to the wilful ways of the wind on the Painted Desert.