Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted DesertLaut, Agnes C.
History
Through Our Unknown Southwest: The Wonderland of the United States—Little Known and Unappreciated—The Home of the Cliff Dweller and the Hopi, the Forest Ranger and the Navajo,—The Lure of the Painted Desert
Laut, Agnes C.
Hopi Indians; Navajo Indians; Southwest, New -- Description and travel
At the southern edge of the National Forests in the Southwest dwell the
remnants of a race, can be seen the remnants of cities, stand houses
near enough the train to be touched by your hand, that run back in
unbroken historic continuity to dynasties preceding the Aztecs of Mexico
or the Copts of Egypt. When the pyramids were young, long before the
flood gates of the Ural Mountains had broken before the inundating Aryan
hordes that overran the forests and mountains of Europe to the edge of
the Netherland seas, this race which you can see to-day dwelling in New
Mexico and Arizona were spinning their wool, working their silver mines,
and on the approach of the enemy, withdrawing to those eagle nests on
the mountain tops which you can see, where only a rope ladder led up to
the city, or uncertain crumbling steps cut in the face of the sheer red
sandstone.
And besides the prehistoric in the Forests--what will you find? The
plains below you like a scroll, the receding cities, a patch of smoke.
You had thought that sky above the plains a cloudless one, air that was
pure, buoyant champagne without dregs. Now the plains are vanishing in a
haze of dust, and you--you are up in that cloudless air, where the light
hits the rocks in spangles of pure crystal, and the tang of the
clearness of it pricks your sluggish blood to a new, buoyant, pulsing
life. You feel as if somehow or other that existence back there in towns
and under roofs had been a life with cobwebs on the brain and weights on
the wings of the spirit. I wonder if it wasn't? I wonder if the
ancients, after all, didn't accord with science in ascribing to the sun,
to the god of Light, the source of all our strength? Things are
accomplished not in the thinking, but in the clearness of the thinking;
and here is the realm of pure light.
Presently, the train carrying you up to the Forests of the Southwest
gives a bump. You are in darkness--diving through some tunnel or other;
and when you come out, you could drop a stone sheer down to the plains a
couple of miles. That is not so far as up in South Dakota. In Sundance
Canyon off the National Forests there, you can drop a pebble down seven
miles. That's not as the crow flies. It is as the train climbs. But
patience! The road into Sundance Canyon takes you to the top of the
world, to be sure; but that is only 7,000 feet up; and this little
Moffat Road in Colorado takes you above timber line, above cloud line,
pretty nearly above growth line, 12,000 feet above the sea; at 11,600
you can take your lunch inside a snow shed on the Moffat Road.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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