We had trailed spring up from Texas through Arizona, timing our progress so cleverly that it seemed as if we had only to turn our radiator’s nose down a desert path for blue lupin and golden poppies to blaze up before us. At last we reached the meeting of the Rockies with the Rio Grande in New Mexico, led by the devious route, sometimes a concrete avenue, but oftener a mere track in the sand, of the old Spanish highway. El Camino Real is the imposing name it bears, suggesting ancient caravans of colonial grandees, and pack-trains bearing treasure from Mexico City to the provincial trading-post of Santa Fé. Even today what sign-posts the road displays bear the letters K T, which from Mexico to Canada stand for King’s Trail. The name gave us a little thrill, to be still extant in a government which had supposedly repudiated kings this century and a half. From San Anton’ on, as we left behind us the big mushroom cities of Texas, the country became more and more sparsely settled. The few people we met, mostly small farmers ploughing their fields primitively, bade us a courteous good day in Spanish, for in this country Mexico spills untidily into the United States. We soon forgot altogether that we were in the States. First we came upon a desert country, vast and lonely, with golden sand in place of grass, spiny, stiff-limbed cactus for trees, and strangely colored cliffs of lemon and orange and livid white. After days of this desolation we emerged upon the valley of the Rio Grande where its many tributaries rib the desert as they run from snowy peaks to join its muddy red waters. The air here is crystal keen, warmed by intense sun, cooled by mountain winds, and sweetened by millions of piñons dotting the red hillsides. Lilac and blue mountains ring the valley on both sides, and from them emerald fields of alfalfa, sparkling in the sun, slope down to the old, winding stream. Because its silt is so fertile, one race has succeeded another here--cliff-dwellers, Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and American--and a remnant of each, save the earliest, has clung where living is easy. So we came all along the Rio Grande for a hundred miles to little groups of towns, each allotted to a different race keeping itself to itself, Mexican, American, and Indian.