To our left, beyond masses of smooth, marvelously contorted sandstone rose white cliffs, seared and ghostly, and beyond them, far reaches of mountain, with Navajo king of all. Clouds and mist encircled its slopes, but the peak rose clear above them into a thunderous sky. We kept the grand old mountain in sight for several miles, then dipped into a small and lovely valley, full of flowers and watered by a winding stream. This was Surprise Valley, famous in the movies as the scene of a thrilling tale of a man and woman walled in for years by one boulder pushed to block the only entrance. It is a pity to spoil the thrill, but I could not see how any one boulder, however large, could block all exit from this valley. Nevertheless its seclusion and unexpectedness make it a delight. The inevitable cliffs surround it in a red circle, and once within, a stranger could look for hours for the trail out. Thus far, the trail had been not only beautiful, but climacteric, and from this point to the great arch it was entirely outside one’s experience. We had to recreate our sense of proportions to fit the gigantic land. I felt as if I had been shipwrecked on the moon. We who started feeling fairly important and self-satisfied and had become daily more insignificant, were mere specks in a landscape carved out by giants,--a landscape of sculptors, done by some Rodin of the gods, who had massed and hurled mountains of rock about, twisted them in a thousand fantastic figures, as if they had been mere handfuls of clay. Against the prodigious canyons down which our tired beasts slowly carried us, we were too small to be seen. Nonnezoche Boco,--“Rainbow Canyon,” in the Navajo,--brought us into an ever narrowing pass with terra-cotta walls rising thousands of feet on every side, and a turbulent stream, much interrupted by boulders, at the bottom. Sometimes we threaded the valley floor, and sometimes mounted to a shelf along the edge. Finally, when it seemed impossible for Nature to reserve any climax for us, we looked to the left,--and saw an anticlimax. We had been straining our eyes straight ahead, each eager for the first sight of the Bridge, the mammoth bridge, highest in the world. As we crossed the canyon, looking down its length we saw a toy arch nestled among the smooth cliffs, like a mouse among elephants.