The sunrise, when it came, was worth waiting for. Fresh-washed and glowing, the holiday colors of the hills came out from the mediocre buffs and grays of the desert, and the primrose sky slowly became gilded with glory. As nothing exceeds the weariness of the desert at noon, so nothing compares with its freshness, its revelation of beauty, at dawn. Each mesa was outlined in gold. Waves of color, each melting into the next, flushed the prairie and sky. We forgot the tedium of the night in this splendor of morning. We motored slowly through all this glory,--our car having started on the first trial,--through seven miles of mud, but Chin Le had apparently been swallowed up by the deluge. The mesas took on an unfamiliar aspect, and we concluded that hidden by some gully, we had gone beyond our destination. A red-banded Navajo on a pinto rode up curiously when we called him. He was the only soul on the vast horizon, and he understood no English, and appeared slow in comprehending our Navajo. Waving his hand vaguely in the direction from which we came, he repeated one word. “Ishklish!” “If we only knew what ishklish meant we should be all right,” said Toby hopefully. “Not ishklish,--slicklish,” corrected the Golfer who had made quite a specialty of Navajo, and who could pronounce, “De-jiss-je” better than any of us. “Slicklish! I know I’ve heard that word before.” “Ishklish! Slicklish,” we repeated with bent brows, in Gilbertian chorus. “We’ve heard that word before. We’re _sure_ we’ve heard that word before.” “Ishklish!” assented the Navajo. The Golfer pursued his philological meditations to a triumphant end. “Slicklish means matches!” he announced. His discovery did not impress us as he expected. “Why should he come up to a party of motorists at five in the morning to say ‘matches’?” we asked. “Because he wants a cigarette,” answered our linguist. “As it is a marked discourtesy among Indians to offer a cigarette without matches, he takes the more subtle way of begging a smoke by asking for matches. Slicklish!” “Ishklish!” nodded the Navajo. Apparently he could keep on like that forever. Pulling out his cigarette case, the Golfer gave the Indian a handful with a match. The latter gave us a radiant smile, and rode away. “You see that’s what he meant.” Murray often put his finger on the point. “What good does that do us?” he asked.