There are other things to do in the Canyon besides explore the City of the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are passing through parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet classified. There is the globe cactus high up on the black basalt rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun. There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which Tennyson sings in "Maud." Presently, you notice the stream banks crushing together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as mist. Follow farther down! The canyon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain, and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down--down--down--tumbled the waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge to another in spray, then down--down--down to the Rio Grande, many feet below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a shiver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the great archaeologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the simple words--"The Rito is a beautiful place." CHAPTER V THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart business tricks of modern Yankeedom.