One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate? * * * * * I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way. We left Santa Fe at six A. M., the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills. I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met only two Mexican teams on the way. From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic _tufa_ hub deep in ash dust, so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20. Here, White Rock Canyon lines both sides of the Rio Grande--precipices steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square block; and coming into this canyon at right angles are the canyons where lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers--some of them hundreds of feet above the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible canyons, you must drive up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.