The land was still a wonder.  The water wizards of old had done their grotesque utmost here.  What with sculpturing and frescoing, they had made that most fantastic wilderness the Painted Desert.  It looked like a mirage.  The travellers had an impression that here was some atmospheric illusion.  It seemed as if it could not last five minutes if the sun should shine upon it.  There were crowding hills so variegated and gay as to put one in mind of masses of soap-bubbles.  But the coloring was laid on fifteen hundred feet deep.  It consisted of sandstone marls, red, blue, green, orange, purple, white, brown, lilac, and yellow, interstratified with magnesian limestone in bands of purple, bluish-white, and mottled, with here and there shining flecks or great glares of gypsum.

Among the more delicate wonders of the scene were the petrified trunks which had once been pines and cedars, but which were now flint or jasper.  The washings of geologic aeons have exposed to view immense quantities of these enchanted forests.  Fragments of silicified trees are not only strewn over the lowlands, but are piled by the hundred cords at the bases of slopes, seeming like so much drift-wood from wonder-lands far up the stream of time.  Generally they are in short bits, broken square across the grain, as if sawed.  Some are jasper, and look like masses of red sealing-wax; others are agate, or opalescent chalcedony, beautifully lined and variegated; many retain the graining, layers, knots, and other details of their woody structure.

In places where the marls had been washed away gently, the emigrants found trunks complete, from root to summit, fifty feet in length and three in diameter.  All the branches, however, were gone; the tree had been uprooted, transported, whirled and worn by deluges; then to commemorate the victory of the water sprites, it had been changed into stone.  The sight of these remnants of antediluvian woodlands made history seem the reminiscence of a child.  They were already petrifactions when the human race was born.

The Painted Desert has other marvels.  Throughout vast stretches you pass between tinted mesas, or tables, which face each other across flat valleys like painted palaces across the streets of Genova la Superba.  They are giant splendors, hundreds of feet in height, built of blood-red sandstone capped with variegated marls.  The torrents, which scooped out the intersecting levels, amused their monstrous leisure with carving the points and abutments of the mesa into fantastic forms, so that the traveller sees towers, minarets, and spires loftier than the pinnacles of cathedrals.

The emigrants were often deceived by these freaks of nature.  Beheld from a distance, it seemed impossible that they should not be ruins, the monuments of some Cyclopean race.  Aunt Maria, in particular, discovered casas grandes and casas de Montezuma very frequently.

“There is another casa,” she would say, staring through her spectacles (broken) at a butte three hundred feet high.  “What a people it must have been which raised such edifices!”