endeavours to inaugurate somewhere a religious centre, but without
success. The San Dionisio marked on his map at the mouth of the Gila
was only the name he gave a Yuma village at that point, and was never
anything more. On November 21, 1701, Kino reached a point only one
day's journey above the sea, where he crossed the river on a raft,
but he made no attempt to go to the mouth. At last, however, on March
7, 1702, he actually set foot on the barren sands where the waters,
gathered from a hundred mountain peaks of the far interior, are
hurled against the sea-tide, the first white visitor since Onate,
ninety-eight years before. Visits of Europeans to this region were
then counted by centuries and half-centuries, yet on the far Atlantic
shore of the continent they were swarming in the cradle of the giant
that should ultimately rule from sea to sea, annihilating the desert.
But even the desert has its charms. One seems to inhale fresh
vitality from its unpeopled immensity. I never could understand why a
desert is not generally considered beautiful; the kind, at least, we
have in the South-west, with all the cacti, the yucca, and the other
flowering plants unfamiliar to European or Eastern eyes, and the
lines of coloured cliffs and the deep canyons. There is far more
beauty and variety of colour than in the summer meadow-stretches and
hills of the Atlantic States. So the good Padre Kino, after all, was
perhaps to be congratulated on having those thirty years, interesting
years, before the wilds could be made commonplace.

Arizona did not seem to yield kindly to the civilisers; indeed, it
was like the Colorado River, repellent and unbreakable. The padres
crossed it and recrossed it on the southwestern corner, but they made
no impression. After Kino's death in 1711 there was a lull in the
entradas to the Colorado, though Ugarte, coming up along the eastern
coast of Lower California, sailed to the mouth of the river in July,