Walking in loose gravel was as hard as trudging along in sand.  After about fifteen miles I began to have leaden feet.  I did not mind hard work, but I wanted to avoid over-exertion.  When I am extremely wearied my feelings are liable to be colored somewhat by depression or melancholy.  Then it always bothered me to get tired while Nielsen kept on with his wonderful stride.

“Say, Nielsen, do you take me for a Yaqui?” I complained.  “Slow up a little.”

Then he obliged me, and to cheer me up he told me about a little tramping experience he had in Baja California.  Somewhere on the east slope of the Sierra Madre his burros strayed or were killed by mountain-lions, and he found it imperative to strike at once for the nearest ranch below the border, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles.  He could carry only so much of his outfit, and as some of it was valuable to him he discarded all his food except a few biscuits, and a canteen of water.  Resting only a few hours, without sleep at all, he walked the hundred and fifty miles in three days and nights.  I believed that Nielsen, by telling me such incidents of his own wild experience, inspired me to more endurance than I knew I possessed.

As we traveled on down the canyon its dimensions continued to grow.  It finally turned to the left, and opened out wide into a valley running west.  A low range of hills faced us, rising in a long sweeping slant of earth, like the incline of a glacier, to rounded spurs.  Half way up this slope, where the brown earth lightened there showed an outcropping of clay-amber and cream and cinnamon and green, all exquisitely vivid and clear.  This bright spot appeared to be isolated.  Far above it rose other clay slopes of variegated hues, red and russet and mauve and gray, and colors indescribably merged, all running in veins through this range of hills.  We faced the west again, and descending this valley were soon greeted by a region of clay hills, bare, cone-shaped, fantastic in shade, slope, and ridge, with a high sharp peak dominating all.  The colors were mauve, taupe, pearl-gray, all stained by a descending band of crimson, as if a higher slope had been stabbed to let its life blood flow down.  The softness, the richness and beauty of this texture of earth amazed and delighted my eyes.

Quite unprepared, at time approaching sunset, we reached and rounded a sharp curve, to see down and far away, and to be held mute in our tracks.  Between a white-mantled mountain range on the left and the dark-striped lofty range on the right I could see far down into a gulf, a hazy void, a vast stark valley that seemed streaked and ridged and canyoned, an abyss into which veils of rain were dropping and over which broken clouds hung, pierced by red and gold rays.