The essential quality of the Canyon de Chelley is not its grandeur, I think, but its rhythm, and the opposite may be said of the Bridge. Those who have seen only de Chelley might well challenge this statement, for a river walled in its entire length by cliffs a quarter to a half mile high can hardly be called less than tremendous. But following as it does the meanderings of a whimsical stream, none of the continuous pictures it makes lacks graceful composition. Here one could spend pleasant months, loafing in those little groves by the river’s brim. Now the Rainbow Trail could never be called pleasant. It is ferocious, forbidding, terrible, desolate, vast,--with relieving oases of garden and stream, but it does not invite to loaf. It is an arduous and exacting pilgrimage. It does not smile, like de Chelley, nor remind one of the gracious and stately landscapes of Claude Lorrain. [Illustration: CASA BLANCA, CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA. The rock is blood red when the sun strikes it, and purple in the shadow.] Perhaps a better climax would have been gained by seeing the Canyon de Chelley first, and progressing to the Bridge, as we should have done had de Chelley not been flooded when we stopped on our way to Kayenta. But anticlimax or not, we loved the rest and relaxation after our strenuous adventure. It was like entering Heaven and finding it unexpectedly gay. CHAPTER XXII NORTH OF GALLUP I can still, by shutting my eyes, see thousands of vistas,--little twisting roads clinging tightly to cliffs, tangles of cactus, gray cliff dwellings, pregnant with the haunting sense of life fled recently, deserts ablaze overnight with golden poppies and blue lupin, forests of giant pines backed by blue mountains, snow-peaked; long views of green valleys with cottonwood-bordered streams, miles of silver pampas grass, neat rows of ugly new bungalows in uncompromising sunlight, older wooden shacks with false fronts, dry prairies white with the skeletons of cattle, copper colored canyons dropping from underfoot far into the depths of earth, water-holes with thousands of moving sheep; spiky, waxen yuccas against a night sky;--all this is the West, but inseparable from these mental visions come pungent odors so sharp that I can almost smell them now.