I have always wondered what would have happened if Toby and I had attempted that journey alone, as we first intended. This Navajo desert was the wildest, most unfrequented district we saw from Galveston to Boston. Only a Dunsany could give an idea of its loneliness, its menace, its weird beauty. Our guide had the western sense for general direction, and had been to Kayenta before, yet even he lost his bearings once. To us, it was a tiny spot easily obscured by the tremendous wastes on all sides. Yet I should like to know if Toby and I could have managed it alone. Something about the country, and in the swart faces of the supple Navajos on horseback, their flowing locks banded with scarlet, reminded me of old pictures of Thibetan plains and the fierce Mongolian horsemen with broad cheek-bones, slant eyes and piercing gaze. Kayenta is a gateway, like Thibet, to the Unknown. It is a frontier, perhaps the last real frontier in the States. Only Piutes and Navajos brave the stupendous Beyond. Backed up against oddly-shaped monoliths and orange buttes are half a dozen small adobe houses, among them the vine-covered house and store of John Wetherell, the most famous citizen of Four Corners. A thousand sheep fill the air with bleatings like the tin horns of a thousand picnickers, as they are driven in from pasture by a little Navajo maid on a painted pony, her rope around her saddle horn. A stocky Indian in leather chaps gallops down to the corral, driving two score horses before him. Wagons come creaking in, laden with great bags of wool. A trader from the Hopi country or Chin Le rattles in to spend a few days on business, or stay the night in the hospitable adobe house. Government officials, visiting or stationed here, saunter in to chat or get information. Groups of Navajos bask in the sun. Every passing, every stir of life on the great expanse, is an event to be talked over from many angles. At the Wetherell’s, we found homeliness, a bountiful table, and marvel of marvel, the bath-tub furthest from an express office in the States. A few miles further north, all traces of civilization drop out of sight, and you are living the Day after Creation. John Wetherell, though supple as a lank cowpuncher and fifty years young, is already an “old-timer.” Henry Ford put him and his kind, as fine as this country ever bred, into the past generation, overnight. In this youth, he and his brothers rode down an unknown canyon hunting strayed cattle, and discovered the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde, now the best known of all. From that moment, discovering cliff dwellings became a passion with the Wetherells. Shard heaps yielded up their treasures to them, and lonely canyons disclosed human swallow’s nests hitherto uncharted by the government. From Colorado, John Wetherell moved to Kayenta, where he gained the confidence of the Navajo as few white men have ever done.