Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable--then, suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a plummet--two canyons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another canyon slashed through the rocks in a deep trench--both rivers silver in the moonlight, with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or the waves of the sea. What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern adventure. I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two canyons are so close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one picture except from an airship. It is as if the earth were suddenly rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down! The bronchos will manage that, where an Eastern horse would break his neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the horse, too.