At seven one morning in May, equipped with one of Mr. Hubbell's fastest teams and a good Mexican driver who knew the trail, we set out from Ganado for Keam's Canyon. It need scarcely be stated here that in Desert travel you must carry your water keg, "grub" box and horse feed with you. All these, up to the present, Mr. Hubbell has freely supplied passers-by; but as travel increases through the Painted Desert, it is a system that must surely be changed, not because the public love Mr. Hubbell "less, but more." The morning air was pure wine. The hills were veiled in a lilac light--tones, half-tones, shades and subtle suggestions of subdued glory--with an almost Alpine glow where the red sunrise came through notches of the painted peaks. _Hogan_ after _hogan_, with sheep corrals in cedar shakes, we passed, where little boys and girls were driving the sheep and goats up and down from the watering places. Presently, as you drive northwestward, there swim through the opaline haze peculiar to the Desert, purplish-green forested peaks splashed with snow on the summit--the Francisco Mountains of Flagstaff far to the South; and you are on a high sagebrush mesa, like a gray sea, with miles, miles upon miles (for three hours you drive through it) of delicate, lilac-scented bloom, the sagebrush in blossom. I can liken it to nothing but the appearance of the sea at sunrise or sunset when a sort of misty lavender light follows the red glow. This mesa leads you into the cedar woods, an incense-scented forest far as you can see for hours and hours. You begin to understand how a desert has not only mountains and hills but forests. In fact, the northern belt of the Painted Desert comprises the Kaibab Forest, and the southern belt the Tusayan and Coconino Forests, the Mesas of the Moki and Navajo Land lying like a wedge between these two belts. Then, towards midday, your trail has been dropping so gradually that you hardly realize it till you slither down a sand bank and find yourself between the yellow pumice walls of a blind _cul-de-sac_ in the rock--nooning place--where a tiny trickle of pure spring water pours out of the upper angle of rock, forming a pool in a natural basin of stone. Here cowboys of the long-ago days, when this was a no-man's-land, have fenced the waters in from pollution and painted hands of blood on the walls of the cave roof above the spring. Wherever you find pools in the Desert, there the Desert silence is broken by life; unbroken range ponies trotting back and forward for a drink, blue jays and bluebirds flashing phantoms in the sunlight, the wild doves fluttering in flocks and sounding their mournful "hoo-hoo-hoo."