Canyon after canyon opened before us, painted in the distance with every hue imaginable. Piute Canyon was buff and pink; Copper canyon, following soon after, a gorgeous blaze of rich red and deep blue tones. Then came a succession of three smaller canyons each turned a different hue by the sun, the distance and the substance of the rock. We ascended and descended in the blazing heat, until it seemed as if all life had been a going up and a coming down. Toward sunset on the ninth day, a trail overlooking a long narrow valley ended abruptly in a pass cut through solid boulders which we could barely ride through. Beyond, unexpectedly, a broad vista of the Monument country spread like a vision of the promised land. Isolated cliffs pointed the valley, in every grotesque form. Rocks as high as Cleopatra’s Needle and the arch of Napoleon, and similarly shaped; new world sphinxes, organ rocks, trumpeting angels, shapes of beasts and men had been carved here in past ages by the freaks of wind and water. One of the busiest corners of the earth ages ago and now the loneliest and most desolate, its beauty was like a woman’s who had survived every passion, and lives in retrospect. El Capitan, rising alone from the yellow sands, sailed before us like a full-rigged ship from sunset to the next morning, when we rode our last eighteen miles to Kayenta. The sight of it, and the orange dunes beyond spurred us all. Spontaneously we broke into a twelve mile canter. The little white mule Annie who had finally fallen to me, kept her freshness and speed and general pluckiness. She out-distanced them all by a length. We made a ludicrous picture as we came flying over the rocks and dunes and desert, shouting and galloping. Even the pack beasts, worn to bone since they departed from the corral, smelled Kayenta, and there was no stopping them. Navajos rode out to join us, leaving their herd of a thousand sheep to cross our path at their peril. We arrived not half an hour after the Indian messenger, sent ahead to tell of our coming. How civilized the remote little trading post seemed! How ultra-æsthetic to eat at a table with napkins and table linen, food passed by a neat Navajo maid! What throngs of people inhabited Kayenta,--more than we had met altogether in ten days! We bathed who had not seen water, we feasted and relaxed, and bought Navajo necklaces in the store. To our surprise the same old women we had left behind us were still alive and scarcely grayer or more toothless; we had not been away for years, as had seemed from our isolation in the still canyons where all sense of time disappeared and we lived in eternity along with the rocks and sky.