of this plateau country looked alike, and Shefford was at some pains to tell the difference of this strange ground from that which he had been over.  In another hour they got out of the rugged, broken rock to the wind-worn and smooth, shallow canyon.  Shefford calculated that they were coming to the end of the plateau.  The low walls slanted lower; the canyon made a turn; Nas Ta Bega disappeared; and then the others of the party.  When Shefford turned the corner of wall he saw a short strip of bare, rocky ground with only sky beyond.  The Indian and his followers had halted in a group.  Shefford rode to them, halted himself, and in one sweeping glance realized the meaning of their silent gaze.  But immediately Nas Ta Bega started down; and the mustangs, without word or touch, followed him.  Shefford, however, lingered on the promontory.

His gaze seemed impelled and held by things afar—­the great yellow-and-purple corrugated world of distance, now on a level with his eyes.  He was drawn by the beauty and the grandeur of that scene and transfixed by the realization that he had dared to venture to find a way through this vast, wild, and upflung fastness.  He kept looking afar, sweeping the three-quartered circle of horizon till his judgment of distance was confounded and his sense of proportion dwarfed one moment and magnified the next.  Then he withdrew his fascinated gaze to adopt the Indian’s method of studying unlimited spaces in the desert—­to look with slow, contracted eyes from near to far.

His companions had begun to zigzag down a long slope, bare of rock, with yellow gravel patches showing between the scant strips of green, and here and there a scrub-cedar.  Half a mile down, the slope merged into green level.  But close, keen gaze made out this level to be a rolling plain, growing darker green, with blue lines of ravines, and thin, undefined spaces that might be mirage.  Miles and miles it swept and relied and heaved to lose its waves in apparent darker level.  A round, red rock stood isolated, marking the end of the barren plain, and farther on were other round rocks, all isolated, all of different shape.  They resembled huge grazing cattle.  But as Shefford gazed, and his sight gained strength from steadily holding it to separate features these rocks were strangely magnified.  They grew and grew into mounds, castles, domes, crags—­great, red, wind-carved buttes.  One by one they drew his gaze to the wall of upflung rock.  He seemed to see a thousand domes of a thousand shapes and colors, and among them a thousand blue clefts, each one a little mark in his sight, yet which he knew was a canyon.  So far he gained some idea of what he saw.  But beyond this wide area of curved lines rose another wall, dwarfing the lower, dark red, horizon—­long, magnificent in frowning boldness, and because of its limitless deceiving surfaces, breaks, and lines, incomprehensible to the sight of man.  Away to the eastward began