I cannot hope to reproduce the charm and joy of our wanderings, despite mishaps and disasters, because the freshness of mountain altitudes will not drift from the leaves of this book, nor the perfume of sunshine on resin, of miles of mountain flowers, nor the scent of desert dust, dry and untainted by man, the sharp smell of camps,--bacon cooking, wet canvas, horse blankets and leather;--bitter-sweet sage, sweet to the nostril and keen to the tongue, nor the tang of new-cut lumber, frosty nights, and fresh-water lakes, glacier cooled; the reek of an Indian village, redolent of doeskin and dried meats hanging in the sun;--I am homesick for them! And so is everyone who has found good hunting northwest of the Rio Grande. We again found ourselves on the old Spanish Trail, which leads into Utah through Farmington and a bit of Colorado. Most of the way it was desert, a wicked collection of chuck-holes, high centers, tree-roots, gullies and sand drifts. This was a district once highly respected and avoided, for a few miles further north lay the four state boundaries. Men who find proximity to a state line convenient were twice as well suited with the Four Corners, reckoning arithmetically,--or four times, geometrically. Its convenience probably increased by the same ratio their abandoned character over other abandoned characters who had only two states in which to play hop-scotch with the sheriff. No doubt most of these professional outlaws have disappeared, picked off by the law’s revenge, or by private feud. We should have liked to explore this region further, but sundown was too near for this to be a judicious act, and while we were not always discreet, we were at times. In late afternoon we looked ahead of us, and saw in this sea of sand two schooners with purple sails full rigged, rosy lighted by the setting sun. They tilted gracefully on a northerly course, the nearer one seeming to loom as high above the other as a sloop above a little catboat. No other landmark lifted above the long horizon save the low hills on our west which at Canyon de Chelley had been east of us. Only when we traveled five, ten, fifteen miles did we realize the magnitude of these giant ships of rock, made so light by the reflection of sand and sun that the sails seemed cut out of amethyst tissue rather than carved of granite. When we passed the first rock, which had seemed so high, it took its proper place, and it became the catboat, while the real Shiprock, we saw, far excelled the other in size and in its likeness to a ship. With the afterglow, the desert became gray and the ship golden, with purple edged sails. At dark the desert became blue-black, and the ship melted into a gossamer mist, looming higher as we neared it. It must be five or six hundred feet high, and so precipitous that nobody has ever scaled its outspread wings, though the Human Fly came from New York for the purpose, and returned defeated.