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Show 260 WESTERN WILDS. plat of a few acres, a sort of mountain cove, soddc'd with luxuriant grass, and containing another Navajo settlement. Their goats were kind enough to prefer the high gulches, leaving the green grass of the plat in abundance for our stock. In the center was a dug spring, but no running water. The community had abundance of goats' milk and white roots nothing else. While the Navajo prepared our supper, I went to the first liogan, finding an old^ man quite sick, who asked the only Spanish he knew if I had any azucar y cafe, adding that he had not tasted food for a week. His daughter went back to camp with me, after the sugar and coifee, and all the other women in the settlement having arrived, they waited to see us eat. Opening a tin box, to their great astonishment I took out a sardine and jokingly held it out for them to see, then ate it, when they turned away with such expressions of horror and dis-gust that I wr as heartily ashamed of myself. Their feelings were probably about the same as ours would be on seeing a Fejee chewing on the corpse of his grandmother. Fish and turkeys either will be or have been human beings, in their theology ; they never touch the former, and the latter only to escape absolute starvation. I had been warned that I would find my Navajo prone to disregard cleanliness; I found him rather neat and careful. But imagine my astonishment when I saw that all his native politeness could not entirely conceal his disgust at eating with me. The sardines had done for my repu-tation among the Navajoes. Supper over, I climbed as far as possible up one of the side gulches, lighted my pipe, and sat down to watch the line of sunshine and shadow creep slowly up the sixteen hundred feet of the opposite cliff, while the red sun sank behind the mountains. Sunlight gave place to dusk, and the day's heat to a sharp air which made me draw my blanket close around my shoulders ; then came on the brilliant night of this climate, in which every silvery star seems to stand out from a firmament of polished steel. But in a few minutes the moon rose above the east-ward peaks, and poured a flood of glory on the barren rocks, trans-forming the red peaks to shining mountains of gold, and the sand- flat to a flowing, glittering stream of gems. The air held no trace of moisture. I was weary, but the sight was too glorious to admit of sleep. I sat and gazed ; tried to reason on the geology of these hills, but soon nature compelled me from the domain of science to that of imagination. It was a time to admire and enjoy, not to philoso-phize ; for, though we go back in scientific fancy from age to age, from cosmic process to cosmic process, we come at last to a mighty |
