Still below us and as far as eyes could view, we were surrounded by the desert. Now, as the sun sank lower, and the shadows increased, it was no longer a dazzle of gold and silver, as at noonday. All the colors in the world had melted and fused together, a wonderful rose glow tinged rocks and sky alike. Distant, purple mesas floated on the surface of the desert. The sun was a golden ball tracing its path to the horizon. A sea-mist of bluish gray hung over the desert, and undulating waves carried out the semblance of the ocean. The great rock of Walpi seemed like the prow of a ship, or a promontory against which the waves beat. Here in the crowded East, it is hard to write down the satisfying emotion the tremendous vastness created in us. In this world of rocks and sand, something infinitely satisfied us who had been used to green trees and shut in spaces all our lives. We did not want to go back; the desert was all we needed. CHAPTER XIX THE FOUR CORNERS Forty-second street and Broadway is probably the most crowded spot in the United States. The least crowded is this region of the Four Corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona come together. Almost as primeval as when Adam and Eve were bride and groom, it fits no accepted standards; too vast and too lonely for the taste of many, too arid and glaring with sunshine to be called beautiful in a conventional sense, it differs from the ordinary “landscape” as Michelangelo from Meissonier. Here, in a radius of seventy-five miles are a collection of wonders strange enough to belong to another planet. The Navajo and Piute possess this land. Southeast is Zuni with its highly civilized people. Southwest are the Grand Canyon, the Havasupai Canyon, the desert promontories of the Hopis and the petrified forests. Northeast is Mesa Verde National Park. Silence-haunted Canyon du Chelley lies on the edge of Arizona, and just over the line in Utah is a land of weird and mighty freaks, monoliths, erosions, tip-tilted boulders a thousand feet high, and natural bridges, of which the greatest is the Rainbow Bridge. It was the lure of the Rainbow Bridge that had gathered our party together in the immaculate dining-room of El Navajo at Gallup, one morning in late May. We already felt a certain distinction bestowed on us by our quest. Not eighty white people since the world began had viewed that massive arch, one among whom, named Theodore Roosevelt, had written most respectfully of the difficulties of the trail. There were six of us, who had originally met and planned our trip in Santa Fé; the guide, Toby, and I, a brother and sister from Ohio named Murray and Martha, and the Golfer, a man of indestructible good-nature. “Did you get my balls?” inquired the last named, as he stepped from the train. “Did you bring your clubs?” I asked, simultaneously.