“Did you take any other pictures during that period?” asked the President.

“Oh, yes!  I was, I think, fourteen or fifteen when I first determined to give my life to Indian photography.  I didn’t at that time think of making a living out of it.  I had a dream of making a photographic history of the spiritual life of some of the South-western tribes.  It didn’t occur to me that anything but a museum or possibly a library would care for such a collection.  But to my surprise there was a ready market for really good prints of Indians and Indian subjects.  So while I have kept always at work on my ultimate idea, I’ve made and sold many, many pictures of Indians on all sorts of themes.”

Enoch looked from Diana’s half eager, half abashed eyes, to the President’s keen, hawk-like face, then back to Diana.

“What gave you the idea to begin with?” asked the President.

Diana looked thoughtfully out of the window.  Both men watched her with interest.  Enoch’s rough hewn face, with its unalterably somber expression, was set in an almost painful concentration.  The President’s eyes were cool, yet eager.

“It is hard for me to put into words just what first led me into the work,” said Diana slowly.  “I was born in a log house on the rim of the Grand Canyon.  My father was a canyon guide.”

“Yes, Frank Allen, an old Yale man.  I know him.”

“Do you remember him?” cried Diana.  “He’ll be so delighted!  He took you down Bright Angel years ago.”

“Of course I remember him.  Give him my regards when you write to him.  And go on with your story.”

“My mother was a California woman, a very good geologist.  My nurse was a Navajo woman.  Somehow, by the time I was into my teens, I was conscious of the great loss to the world in the disappearance of the spiritual side of Indian life.  I knew the Canyon well by then and I knew the Indians well and the beauty of their ceremonies was even then more or less merged in my mind with the beauty of the Canyon.  Their mysticism was the Canyon’s mysticism.  I tried to write it and I couldn’t, and I tried to paint it, and I couldn’t.  And then one day my mother said to me, ’Diana, nobody can interpret Indian or Canyon philosophy.  Take your camera and let the naked truth tell the story!’”

Diana paused.  “I’m not clever at talking.  I’m afraid I’ve given you no real idea of my purpose.”

“One gets your purpose very clearly, when one recalls your Death and the Navajo, for instance, eh, Huntingdon?”

“Yes, Mr. President!”

“I suppose the two leading Indian ethnologists are Arkwind and Sherman, of the Smithsonian, are they not, Miss Allen?” asked the President.

“Oh, without doubt!  And they have been very kind to me.”

The President nodded.  “They both tell me that your work is of extraordinary value.  They tell me that you have actually photographed ceremonies so secret, so mystical, that they themselves had only heard vaguely of their existence.  And not only, they say, have you photographed them, but you have produced works of art, pictures ‘pregnant with celestial fire.’”