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Show BY PATH AND TRAIL. 155 have wrought incredible marvels unlike anything seen elsewhere upon the earth, and of which the people seem to have no appreciation. The hills and lakes of Switz erland, the Alps and Appenines, to which thousands, year after year, go from America ostensibly to admire the configurations and towering heights of these histor ically famous mountains, can offer nothing to the eye or to the imagination to be compared to the natural won ders of their own land and of which they appear to be unconscious. Nowhere may there be found such extensive areas of arid deserts, crossed and recrossed in every direction by lofty mountains of strange formation, as in this com paratively unknown region. Here are fathomless can yons, dizzy crags and cloud- piercing peaks and a vast array of all the contradictions possible in topography. There are broad stretches of desert, where the winds raise storms of dust and whirl cyclones of sand, carrying death to man and beast. Here are to be found dismal ra vines, horrent abysses and startling canyons, in whose gloomy depths flow streams of water pure and clear as ever rippled through the pages of Cervantes. Here are the cells of the cliff- dwellers, the burrows of the trog lodytes, or pre- historic cave- men, the ruins of the ancient pueblo towns, and traces of pre- Columbian tribes who have gone down amid the fierce conflicts of tribal wars and have disappeared from off the earth. Darwin, Huxley and Maupas are welcome to their theories accounting for the origin of Man and his expan sion from the brute to a civilized being, but my life among and my experience with savages have convinced me that the territory separating the civilized from the savage man could never be crossed by the savage un- |
