Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous, voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf, miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod--gorgeous desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty. Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jose River, jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been, or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M. Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split by the shimmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors, transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus shines with the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars, they draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like bits of heaven, because their faces shine with the light of an unclouded sky from dawn to dark. You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and lilac light and heat haze shimmering and unreal as a poet's vision. It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to shimmer and shift and lift from earth in mirage altogether.