Color in the land

"THE BLUE FOREST" Hubert A. Lowman

The red dirt road, loafing up a shoulder of San Francisco Peaks, is a cool, green aisle in summer, full of shadows and the music of aspen leaves singing in the breeze. În autumn the fallen leaves are gold on the ground and the aspen trees stark, white skeletons, shivering in the wind. When winter comes the dirt road passes through a world of chalk and alabaster that does not change until spring puts the young, delicate silvery green leaves on the trees and vivid flowers along the roadside. Chromatics on a mountain slope!

The plateaus and high mesa country of northeastern Arizona show what nature can do with her pigments ground into sand. Of all landscapes in the world, the Painted Desert is unique. Whoever first stumbled into it and named it could not have picked a better name. It is literally a "painted"

"ASPEN AISLE" Fred H. Ragsdale "ECHO CLIFFS" Hubert A. Lowman

desert and the brush that painted it was a big, big brush and the paint bucket an ocean of color. In places it runs into the darker, sombre tones and in other places to gay pastels. This desert of color, with its scant vegetation, flows along mile after mile, like a placid sea and where the sun hits the tops of the rolling mounds the highlights are prismatic whitecaps. Spectrum in sand and stone! Flames that have turned to dust! The rivers flowing through the land are colorful streams. The Colorado chews away at the red, sandstone cliffs and turns dull reddish brown as it flows toward the sea. Where the rivers flow there is always the green of growing things along the banks and they carry the hues of the land through which they pass. In the dry creeks, where the water runs only during wet seasons, the sand is clean and white in the sun, and the wet seasons are few and far between. During the rainy cycles the picture changes. Then the desert is flamboyant with little flowers; then the desert is covered with lustrous colors, the most radiant blanket Mother Nature ever pulled over the earth. All the land sparkles with color for it is a colorful land... R. C.

"SPANISH BAYONET" Profile of my People

In a far-off Arizona desert lived a little Navajo Indian boy. He was born March 14, 1924, in a hogan no better than the log cabin in which Abraham Lincoln was born. Let me tell you what it means to be a little Navajo Indian boy, born in a hogan on the Navajo reservation. What it means to be a child of the yellow sand country. What it means to be a son of the Dineh-the People. I know, for I am that Navajo boy.

This is what being a Navajo Indian means to me. My home: A hogan at the foot of high red cliffs cut out against the sky; friends who come to help with the building of the hogan with the six sides, mud-plastered, notched logs, and the smoke hole in the roof. It means the finished hogan being blessed with the sacred corn meal as a soft voice chants. All this with a blanket covered doorway facing the rising sun. It means the summer home shelter of cedar trees, with dark faced Indian women watching boiling mutton, stirring corn mush, and making black coffee. It means feeling your sheepskin bed change to a blanket of happiness, while you sleep outside with the moon hanging low.

It means flocks of sheep wandering over the sagebrush country searching for grass; the sad and faint bleat of the lost lamb, and the fear of the coyote. It means running toward the sound only to find the baby lamb caught between rocks, and to think happily, "Lambs are little fools!" as you rub its soft wool against your chin then to drive the sheep homeward with a tin can filled with stones. It means to be lost in the jungle of a dream under the hard blue flatness of the sky; to have this beauty put beauty whispers into your heart, and to paint the beauty whispers on the rocks and the sand of the desert. With thought laughing and heart laughing to paint beauty whispers in the sand. To know and feel that you are an Indian and to be glad. To know that time cannot change the Indian. It means my people. The mother in the shade of the home hogan weaving, making the rug grow with swift