That evening, as we sat on wool bags heaped high near the post, a group of young Navajos came and announced they wished to welcome our return with a serenade. They grouped in a circle, very bashful at our applause, and while one held a lantern, began to sing their ancient tribal songs. I shall never forget the weird setting of rolling hills of orange sand, and moonlighted red cliffs behind the circle of their dark figures. Lightly swaying to the music, they began a savage chanting, with rhythmically placed falsetto yelps and guttural shouts. Their voices had real beauty, and the music suited their surroundings. They started with a mild song of hunting or love, but soon they were singing war songs. Our blood stirred to an echo of something we knew many lives ago. The lantern light made a wilder, wider arc; the shouts became more fierce; the group swayed faster and swung into a wide ellipse. Worked upon by the hypnotism of their war-music, they locked arms about each other in tight grip; for the moment they were ages away from Carlisle. The blackness, the orange hills, the swinging light, the shouts, the listening stillness of the desert,--that will always be Kayenta for me. [Illustration: MONUMENT COUNTRY, RAINBOW TRAIL. Isolated cliffs pointed the valley in every grotesque form.] [Illustration: RAINBOW BRIDGE TRAIL.] CHAPTER XXI THE CANYON DE CHELLEY We had been pulled out of difficulties by donkeys, men, autos and pulleys. It remained for Kayenta to show us a new way out. When a terrific thank-you-marm jolted off our power, our late host’s daughter rode out on her stout cow-pony, roped us, so to speak, and started forward as though she intended to tow us. The knowing horse, who had seen thousands of steers act as the old lady was doing now, treated the car with equal contempt, and braced her feet. It was thirty-horse to one-horse power, but the better animal won. We slid forward in gear, jolting our power on again as we moved ahead. Sluggish after two week’s hard exercise, we were late in getting started for Chin Le. Thunderous clouds were already blackening the afternoon sky. They greatly increased the desert’s beauty, making it majestic beyond words. Soon the storm burst, and silver sheets of rain obliterated everything but the distant red hills. We were in the middle of a flat plain with landmarks more or less like any other landmarks. By twilight we were traveling through thick, red mud, and by dark the mud had disappeared beneath an inland lake. The road was not. We only knew we kept to it, in some miraculous fashion, because we continued slowly to progress. Halfway to Chin Le we stopped in the dark at a little trader’s post, bought gasoline at seventy-five cents a gallon, and continued our splashing. All we could see between two lines of hills was water. We lost the road for a moment, got into a deep draw, and when we emerged from our bath, the generating system was no more.