To describe San Xavier is quite impossible, except through canvas and photograph. There is something intangibly spiritual and unearthly in its very architecture; and this is the spirit in which it was originally built. At daybreak, a bell called the builders to prayers of consecration. At nightfall, vesper bells sent the laborer home with the blessing of the church. For the most part, the workers were Mexicans and Indians; and as far as can be gathered from the annals, voluntary workers. The Papagoes and Pimas at that time numbered 5,000, of whom 500 lived round the Missions, the rest spending the summers hunting in the mountains. [Illustration: On top of the world--a Moki city on a Mesa in the Painted Desert. At the left are the ends of a ladder leading from an underground council chamber] When the American Government took over Arizona, San Xavier went under the diocese of New Mexico. From Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Tucson was 600 miles across desert mountains and canyons, every foot of the way infested by Apache warriors; and the heroism of that trail was marked by the same courage and constancy as signalized the founding and maintenance of the other early Spanish Missions. It would be a mistake to say that San Xavier has been restored. Restoration implies innovation; and San Xavier stands to-day as it stood in the sixteen hundreds, when Father Kino, the famous mathematician and Jesuit from Bavaria, came wandering up from the Missions of Lower California, preaching to the Yumas and Pimas of the hot, smoking hot, Gila Desert, and held mass in Casa Grande, the Great House or Garden of Eden of the Indian's Morning Glow. A lucky thing it is that restoration did not imply change in San Xavier; for the Mission floats in the shimmering desert air, unearthly, eerie, unreal, a thing of beauty and dreams rather than latter day life, white as marble, twin-towered, roof domed and so dazzling in the sunlight to the unaccustomed eye that you somehow know why rows of restful, drowsy palms were planted in line along the front of the wall. Perhaps it is that it comes on you as such a complete surprise. Perhaps it is the desert atmosphere in this cup of the mountains; but all the other missions of the Southwest are adobe gray, or earth color showing through a veneer of drab whitewash. There is the giant, century-old desert cactus twisted and gnarled with age like the trees in Dante's Inferno, but with bird nests in the pillared trunks, where little wrens peck through the bark for water. You look again. A horseman has just dismounted beneath the shade of a fine old twisted oak; but beyond the oak the vision is there, glare, dazzling, white, twin-towered and arched, floating in mid-air, a vision of beauty and dreams.