In justice to travelers and Desert dwellers, two or three facts should be added. Such dust storms occur only in certain spring months. So much in fairness to the Painted Desert. Next, I have cursorily given slight details of the Desert storm, because I don't want any pleasure seekers to think the Painted Desert can be crossed with the comfort of a Pullman car. You have to pay for your fun. We paid in that blinding, stinging, smothering blast as from a furnace, from three to half past five. Women are supposed to be irrepressible talkers. Well--we came to the point where not a soul in the carriage could utter a word for the dust. Lastly, when we saw that the storm was to be such a genuine old-timer, we ought to have tied wet handkerchiefs across our mouths. Glasses we had to keep the dust out of our eyes; but that dust is alkali, and it took a good two weeks' sneezing and a very sore throat to get rid of it. Of the Three Mesas and Oraibi and Hotoville, space forbids details except that they are higher than the village at Acoma. Overlooking the Painted Desert in every direction, they command a view that beggars all description and almost staggers thought. You seem to be overlooking Almighty God's own amphitheater of dazzlingly-colored infinity; and naturally you go dumb with joy of the beauty of it and lose your own personality and perspective utterly. We lunched on the brink of a white precipice 1,500 feet above anywhere, and saw Moki women toiling up that declivity with urns of water on their heads, and photographed naked urchins sunning themselves on the baking bare rock, and stood above _estufas_, or sacred underground council chambers, where the Pueblos held their religious rites before the coming of the Spaniards. Of the Moki towns, Oraibi is, perhaps, cleaner and better than the Three Mesas. The mesas are indescribably, unspeakably filthy. At Oraibi, you can wander through adobe houses clean as your own home quarters, the adobe hard as cement, the rooms divided into sleeping apartments, cooking room, meal bin, etc. Also, being nearer the formation of the Grand Canyon, the coloring surrounding the Mesa is almost as gorgeous as the Canyon. If it had not been that the season was verging on the summer rains, which flood the Little Colorado, we should have gone on from Oraibi to the Grand Canyon. But the Little Colorado is full of quicksands, dangerous to a span of a generous host's horses; so we came back the way we had entered. As we drove down the winding trail that corkscrews from Oraibi to the sand plain, a group of Moki women came running down the footpath and met us just as we were turning our backs on the Mesa. "We love you," exclaimed an old woman extending her hand (the Government doctor interpreted for us), "we love you with all our hearts and have come down to wish you a good-by." CHAPTER VIII THE GRAND CANYON AND PETRIFIED FORESTS