The entire journey through Arizona offers one of the most unique
experiences of a lifetime. Is this "The Country God Forgot"? The vast
stretch of the plains offer effects as infinite as the sea. The vista
includes only land and sky. The cloud forms and the atmospheric effects
are singularly beautiful. As one flies on into Arizona this wonderful
color effect in the air becomes more vivid. Mountains appear here and
there: the journey is up a high grade, and one realizes that he is
entering the altitudes.
A special feature of interest in Arizona is the town of Flagstaff,
famous for the great Lowell Observatory, established there by Percival
Lowell, a nephew of the noble John Lowell, who founded the Lowell
Institute in Boston. Professor Percival Lowell is a man of broad and
varied culture, a great traveller, who has familiarized himself with
most things worth seeing in this sublunary sphere, and has only failed
to explore Mars from reasons quite beyond his own control. At his own
expense he has founded here an Observatory, with a telescope of great
power, by means of which he is making astronomical researches of the
greatest value to science. The special advantage of Arizona in
astronomical study is not the altitude, but in the fact that there is
the least possible vibration in the air here. Mr. Lowell's work makes
Flagstaff a scientific centre of cosmopolitan importance, and scholars
and great scientists from all over the world are constantly arriving in
the little Arizona mountain town to visit the Observatory.
Flagstaff has no little archaeological interest, also; the famous cliff
dwellings of the Zuni tribe, which Frank Cushing explored and studied so
deeply, are within a few miles of the town, located on the summit and
sides of an extinct volcano. They now present the appearance of black
holes, a few yards deep, often surrounded with loose and broken stone
walls, and broken pottery abounds all over the vicinity. The most
remarkable group of the cliff dwellers is to be seen in Walnut Canyon,
eight miles from Flagstaff. This is one of the deep gorges, the cliffs
rising several hundred feet above the valley; and they are sheer
terraced walls of limestone, running for over three miles. In these
terraces, in the most singularly inaccessible places, are dozens of the
cliff dwellings. Some of them are divided into compartments by means of
cemented walls, and they retain traces of quite a degree of
civilization.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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