Monument Valley came with a dazzling flash of lightning. It revealed
a vast valley, a strange world of colossal shafts and buttes of rock,
magnificently sculptored, standing isolated and aloof, dark, weird,
lonely. When the sheet lightning flared across the sky showing the
monuments silhouetted black against that strange horizon the effect
was marvelously beautiful. I watched until the storm died away.

[Illustration: Z. G. AFTER TWO MONTHS IN THE WILDS]

Dawn, with the desert sunrise, changed Monument Valley, bereft it of
its night gloom and weird shadow, and showed it in another aspect of
beauty. It was hard for me to realize that those monuments were not
the works of man. The great valley must once have been a plateau of
red rock from which the softer strata had eroded, leaving the gentle
league-long slopes marked here and there by upstanding pillars and
columns of singular shape and beauty. I rode down the sweet-scented
sage-slopes under the shadow of the lofty Mittens, and around and
across the valley, and back again to the height of land. And when I
had completed the ride a story had woven itself into my mind; and
the spot where I stood was to be the place where Lin Slone taught
Lucy Bostil to ride the great stallion Wildfire.

[Illustration: THERE WAS SOMETHING BEYOND THE WHITE-PEAKED RANGES]

Two days' ride took us across country to the Segi. With this wonderful
canyon I was familiar, that is, as familiar as several visits could
make a man with such a bewildering place. In fact I had named it
Deception Pass. The Segi had innumerable branches, all more or less
the same size, and sometimes it was difficult to tell the main canyon
from one of its tributaries. The walls were rugged and crumbling, of a