We started at noon, our faithful car sagging like a dachshund under a thousand pounds of bedding, tents, food and suitcases, in addition to six passengers,--a load which was a terrific test on these roads. As we left Gallup, passing the “Haystacks” and other oddly shaped landmarks, the road became an apology, and later an insult. High centres scraped the bottom of the weighted car, so that our spare tires acted as a brake, and had to be removed and placed inside, to form an uncomfortable tangle with our legs, wraps and baggage. But in spite of cramped positions we were hilarious, knowing we had actually started on this long-planned adventure, and that before us were eighteen days of companionship, with unknown tests of our endurance, our tempers and possibly our courage, riding hard, sleeping hard, living a roofless existence, without benefit of laundry. An arid place in the scorching sunlight of lunch-time, the desert toward late afternoon became a dream of pastels, isolated mesas floating above its surface in rosy lilac, its floor golden, washed with warm rose and henna tones, with shadows of a misty blue, under a radiance of reflected sunset light. When the color faded, mesas and buttes stood out sharp and black. The desert was no longer a pastel but a charcoal sketch. As vision disappeared our sense of smell was heightened. Freshened in night dew after a parched day, a million tiny flowers seemed concentrated into a penetrating essence, with the aromatic sage strongest of all. Our headlights pierced a gloom miles long. It was ten hours before we reached the twinkle of Chin Lee lights, where we were glad to find shelter and beds. On the next day we averaged exactly nine miles an hour in the eighty miles to Kayenta. In a jolty handwriting I find my auto-log for that day, “Rotten road. High centres, deep arroyos, many ditches. Sand. Part of road like painted desert.” It was a treacherous country to drive in. There were no maps, no sign-posts. Most of the day we met only Navajos, speaking no English. From the few white men we met, we would get some such instructions: “Bear northwest a ways, follow the creek till it forks; a way down on the lower fork you pass a mesa, then bear east, then west.” This over a distance of eighty miles! It was worse than Texas, where we were expected to get our bearings by Uncle Henry! Sometimes our course was deflected by a swollen river, or the wind had buried our tracks with sand. Sometimes the settlement we sought to guide us would be completely hidden by a dip in conformation of the country. Sometimes a mirage brought under our very noses a group of buildings really miles away, with a river between us. Occasionally a vicious chuck-hole jarred our engine to a standstill. Once our guide lost his bearings, and for nearly thirty miles we skipped lightly cross-country, taking pot-luck with the mesas and washes and sage thickets we encountered, finding our way only by a range of hills on our west.