I descended into this yellow maze, this world of gullies and ridges where I found it difficult to keep from getting lost.  I did lose my bearings, but as my boots made deep imprints in the soft clay I knew it would be easy to back-track my trail.  After a while this labyrinthine series of channels and dunes opened into a wide space enclosed on three sides by denuded slopes, mostly yellow.  These slopes were smooth, graceful, symmetrical, with tiny tracery of erosion, and each appeared to retain its own color, yellow or cinnamon or mauve.  But they were always dominated by a higher one of a different color.  And this mystic region sloped and slanted to a great amphitheater that was walled on the opposite side by a mountain of bare earth, of every hue, and of a thousand ribbed and scalloped surfaces.  At its base the golds and russets and yellows were strongest, but ascending its slopes were changing colors—­a dark beautiful mouse color on one side and a strange pearly cream on the other.  Between these great corners of the curve climbed ridges of gray and heliotrope and amber, to meet wonderful veins of green—­green as the sea in sunlight—­and tracery of white—­and on the bold face of this amphitheater, high up, stood out a zigzag belt of dull red, the stain of which had run down to tinge the other hues.  Above all this wondrous coloration upheaved the bare breast of the mountain, growing darker with earthy browns, up to the gray old rock ramparts.

This place affected me so strangely, so irresistibly that I remained there a long time.  Something terrible had happened there to men.  I felt that.  Something tragic was going on right then—­the wearing down, the devastation of the old earth.  How plainly that could be seen!  Geologically it was more remarkable to me than the Grand Canyon.  But it was the appalling meaning, the absolutely indescribable beauty that overcame me.  I thought of those who had been inspiration to me in my work, and I suffered a pang that they could not be there to see and feel with me.

On my way out of this amphitheater a hard wind swooped down over the slopes, tearing up the colored dust in sheets and clouds.  It seemed to me each gully had its mystic pall of color.  I lost no time climbing out.  What a hot choking ordeal!  But I never would have missed it even had I known I would get lost.  Looking down again the scene was vastly changed.  A smoky weird murky hell with the dull sun gleaming magenta-hued through the shifting pall of dust!

In the afternoon we proceeded leisurely, through an atmosphere growing warmer and denser, down to the valley, reaching it at dusk.  We followed the course of Furnace Creek and made camp under some cottonwood trees, on the west slope of the valley.