It wound up the side of the mesa, with sometimes a low parapet to keep us from dropping off, and sometimes nothing at all. A boulder now and then or rough ledge cropping across the road would tilt the old lady at an uncomfortable angle. Heights and climbs over dangerous switchbacks had become commonplaces of travel by now, and we had gained confidence from learning the tremendous flexibility of which a motor car is capable. We were willing, without taking credit for extraordinary courage, to undertake almost any road wide enough for our tracks. People who confine their driving to perfect boulevards and city roads have no idea of the exhilarating game motoring really is. My wrists were like iron, and I had developed a grip in my fingers it would have taken years to acquire otherwise. No grade seemed too steep for the “old lady,”--how we relied on her pulling power! Much of the climb we accomplished on high, though at the final grade, where she fairly stood on end, we shifted to low. And at last we were in the street of Walpi, looking down on a blue-gray sea several hundred feet below us, and surrounded by a group of interested natives, who with great presence of mind had filled their hands with pottery to sell. What is commonly called Walpi is really three towns, Walpi, Sichomovi, and a Tewa village called Hano. The people in the last village, which is the first as you enter the towns from the road, have little traffic with the Walpi people, but the division line is well nigh invisible between Sichomovi and Hano. Beyond the second town the mesa narrows, and over a slender tongue of rock, part of which has fallen away in recent years during a severe storm, we looked across to the most interesting village of Walpi. Against an intense blue sky it blocked its irregular outline high above the delicate desert, with gnarled sticks of ladders angling out from the solid mass of buildings. The crazy but fascinating stone houses merging into one another, now swallowing up the road and later disgorging it, made with their warm sandstone color an effective background for the people who came and went in the streets, or sat in the doorways in silver and scarlet. The housetops were lively with children and women in native costume, or, more comfortably and less picturesquely in the ginghams and plaid shawls beloved of Indians. The squat houses, the women bending their necks to great water jars, the desert, all suggested a new-world Palestine. [Illustration: THE VILLAGE OF WALPI.] [Illustration: OLDEST HOUSE IN WALPI.]