CHAPTER V 

 THE PAINTED CANVAS OF THE DESERT 



There Is nothing so beautiful as the dash of color painted 

 by that great artist, Nature, on the canvas of the desert In 

 the springtime and early summer. It Is here that plant and 

 flower families vie with each other In their parade of color 

 and fashion. Likewise man, who Is tired and hungry for 

 the great open spaces with his year's work behind him In the 

 spring, seeks the hidden byways trodden only by the few, 

 where he may tramp and meditate and commune with Nature. 

 He loves to hunt new places, to see new things, and then on 

 some winter's evening to lean back In his comfortable chair 

 and blow smoke rings around the places come back to him 

 again In fancy, where he found that odd piece of cactus lace- 

 work and that patch-pattern of thorns and spikes and stems. 

 And he wonders, then, how such marvelous colorings could 

 be, and why they should be, away out In those forgotten places 

 far from the hoof-mark of a burro or the footprint of an 

 Indian or a daring tenderfoot. 



The desert Is not unlike some huge canvas stretched out 

 over vast distances of mesa and foothill, valley and moun- 

 tain, which takes on mysterious splashes of color during each 

 cycle of the spring, fading then In the heat of summer and 

 fall. Imagine If you can this tremendous stretch of the 

 desert-canvas tinted with all the minute tracings of the 

 aurora borealls. For to be sure the Image of the great 

 painted canvas of the desert. If Inverted and hung high In 

 the heavens so as to be seen in all its brilliance, might well 



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