SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled in a mist, intangible and shimmering as dreams--a mist shot with the gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the dead heat of midsummer, snow shines opal from the mountain peaks; and in the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying prone, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as the faces of god-like races ever are. You wind round a juniper grove--"cedars of Lebanon," the Old Testament would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds--only they call them "herders," fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms shade the ground. And the maidens are there, "drawing water from the well," carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers, hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled. You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,--and a winged horseman spurs past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse--that is why the Oriental always called an enemy "a dog." Pottery makers look up from their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote passerby. The basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye; and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools. Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.