38 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



and bluish, orange and gray and umber brown, 

 the streaked and splashed clays and marls had 

 been carved by wind and weather into a thou- 

 sand outlandish forms. Funnel-shaped sand- 

 storms moved across the waste. We climbed 

 gradually upward to the top of the mesa. The 

 yellow sand grew heavier and deeper. There 

 w^ere occasional short streams from springs; 

 but they ran in deep gullies, with nothing to 

 tell of their presence; never a tree near by and 

 hardly a bush or a tuft of grass, unless planted 

 and tended by man. We passed the stone walls 

 of an abandoned trading-post. The desert had 

 claimed its own. The ruins lay close to a low 

 range of cliffs; the white sand, dazzling under 

 the sun, had drifted everywhere; there was not 

 a plant, not a green thing in sight — nothing 

 but the parched and burning lifelessness of rock 

 and sand. This northern Arizona desert was 

 less attractive than the southern desert along 

 the road to the Roosevelt Dam and near Mesa, 

 for instance; for in the south the cactus growth 

 is infinitely varied in size and in fantastic 

 shape. 



In the late afternoon we reached Tuba, with 

 its Indian school and its trader's store. Tuba 

 was once a Mormon settlement, the Mormons 

 having been invited thither by the people of a 



