The day we started for Taos, rain invoked by the prayerful Pueblos had reduced the road-bed to a sticky red plaster which more than once slid our car gently toward the edge and a drop of a hundred feet or more. Like the foolish virgins we were, we had forgotten our chains. To put on the brakes would invite a skid; not to do so meant a plunge over the bank. The road, like an afterthought, clung for dear life to the edge of a series of hills, now dipping like a swallow to the river bed, then after the usual chuck-hole at the bottom, rising in dizzy turns to the top of the next hill, unwinding before us sometimes for miles. Steep cliffs, and narrow gorges at times shut us completely from the world. Far below, the river frothed turbulently. Occasionally as we took a turn, a bit of bank caved in with us, and left one wheel treading air. On sharp curves a long wheel base is a great disadvantage. The earth is liable to crumble where rain has softened it in gullies, and one must learn to keep close enough to the inside edge in turning to prevent the back wheels from skimming the precipice, and yet not drive the front wheels into the inside bank. Add to this a surface of slick mud on which the car slides helplessly, heavy ruts and frequent boulders, steep graded curves with gullies at the bottom, and it will seem less surprising that the mail driver who takes his own car and his life over this road twice a week to Santa Fé receives about three times the wage of a Harvard professor. A few miles before reaching Taos we left the canyon and came out on a broad plain. The first sight of Taos takes one’s breath,--it is so alien to America. Ancient of days, it suggests Jerusalem or some village still more remote in civilization. Houses terraced to five and even seven stories are banked against purple mountains, thirteen thousand feet in the air. A little stream winds to the walls of the village, dividing it in two. On the banks women wash clothes, and men draw primitive carts to the water, or gallop over the plain like Arabs in the flowing white robes characteristic to Taos. The roofs of the square plaster houses, terraced one above the other, are peopled with naked babies. Women wrapped in shawls of virgin blue or scarlet outlined against the sky, again suggest the Orient. Constantly in these Pueblos one is reminded of the Far East and it is easy to believe these Indians of the Southwest, of sleek round yellow cheek and almond eyes are of Mongolian stock. The Grand Canyon old-timer, William Bass, tells of seeing a distinguished Chinese visitor talk with ease to some Navajos of the Painted desert, who, he reported, used a rough Chinese dialect. In the Shoshone country, I myself saw Indians enter a Chinese restaurant, and converse with the slant-eyed proprietor. When I asked whether they were speaking Shoshone or Chinese, I was told that they used a sort of _lingua franca_, and had no difficulty in understanding each other.