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Show 78 WESTERN WILDS. little burro, weak in body and sad at recent parting ; but soon fresh air and exercise, with change of scene, brought new life, and I felt a strange interest in the people we encountered. We passed hot deserts, glistening with sand and alkali ; broad plateaus of bare sandstone, and occasionally green dells or wooded coves, where the natural beauty, by contrast with surrounding barrenness, awakened emotions of keen delight. Sometimes we jogged on for hours over a bare flat, then from the rocky rim walling an ancient basin descended to the beds of lakes long since dry, to find in the center and lowest depressions rich natural meadows or sullen pools, bordered by a few sickly cottonwoods. We traversed wild gorges, where from every side red precipices frowned upon yellow sands; we crossed sandy wastes where glittered quartz- crystals, garnets, and flakes of mica, and saw upon the scarred peaks the awful evi-dences of a thousand cosmic convulsions. We passed amid bands of savage men, who grew gentle at our approach, after a few words or signs from Gomez; and traveled for days along a valley strewn with the ruins of abandoned towns. Again we turned to the hills, crossed the lowest divide of the Sierra Madre, and traveled on over sterile flats and treeless, grassless mesas. It seemed a land accursed of God and forgotten of civilized men, where only hunt-ers and herdsmen could wring a scant subsistence from unwilling nature; a land which even the all- grasping Spaniard did not covet, but left as a refuge for those who could not give him gold for blood, and would not yield the sweat of unpaid toil for his religion. " Beyond the last range of the Sierra Madre we descended to the cafion of the Colorado Chiquito, rose again to the Mesa Calabasa, and again cautiously threaded a defile down to an oval basin some thirty miles in width, dotted with little oases rich in native grasses. In the center of this vale Gomez pointed out the goal of our hopes. A sharp mesa rose abruptly from the plain, and on its summit were the Moqui towns. A few friendly JSTavajoes had accompanied us ; for there was a temporary peace between them and their fierce neighbors, the Apaches. Rushing down the rocky paths with wild cries, the Moquis came to the foot of the mesa in disorder and apparent anger at our approach ; but a few words from Gomez reas-sured them, and I was conducted up the winding way by which alone the place is accessible, and led into the presence of their chief. He received me with civil dignity, assigned me a hoiise, for many were vacant, and in a few days I was as much at home with these strange people as if I had been there for years. The |