Red Walls of Navajoland

WALLS OF THE wonderful canyons, red walls of sun-tinted sandstone, where little winds pass and the pale sand drifts at the base of enormous slabs. Sheer walls, grand amphitheatres, turrets, ledges and domes, twilight of hollow shadows between revelations of sun and there the beginning of arches, split off from the lightning-scarred rock out of a thousand-year silence; to be, at the end of another ten-thousand year silence, a cavern to hold the dim records of men yet unpredicted. There, so the Navajo say, the ghosts of the ancients, the Yei-bechai, abide in the cliff-dwellers' ruins, where they glide between sunlight and shadow. There, high on the cliffside, unnamed, undeciphered, are graven the symbols of tribes long since sifted away into the dust of the desert, the mysterious giant ancestors, dimly remembered. There, as the war-eagle sails slowly along the sky-brink, his blue shadow slants far down the immense broken red fingers of stone. Close-grouped the few cottonwoods stand, green in the coves of the canyon, where the sand-bars are hard and damp from the freshet; and near, in the rain-carven water-hole, glimmers the little pool, blue to the sky. Then a thin sound, and the solemn walls whisper an answer a long wild wavering note, high-quavered and keen; and there, riding small and dark at the base of the leaning grandeur, the Navajo man comes singing.