Not A Chipmunk, Prairie-Dog, Coyote, Rat, Mouse, Porcupine, Fox, Bear, Mountain-Lion, Badger, Deer, Antelope Or Other Four-Footed Creature Ran Over Its New-Born Surfaces.

The sun shone unhindered; the rain beat with pitiless fury; the winds swept unhampered; the snows piled up undeterred over the whole plateau and canyon country.

It was plateau and canyon, canyon and plateau; red rock, gray rock, creamy rock, yellow, pink, blue, chocolate, carmine, crimson rock, soft rock, hard rock; sunshine, shadow, wind and quietude; winter, summer, autumn, spring-and that was all! A lifeless world, as yet unprepared for insect, reptile, beast, man, flower or tree. Perhaps a solitary sea-bird with strong pinion flew over it, and gazed into its lifeless depths with wonder, or a dove flew from some earlier and habitable land over this wonderful mass of rock, and returned to its nest and its mate. But no olive or other leaf was in its bill.

*An insect that looks like a tiny dried wisp of hay, well-known in Arizona.

And so the land was born, and rested; while silence, sunshine and solitude brooded over it.

Creation of Soil and Verdure. But in the course of ages, soil was created by the disintegration of the rocks by the weather and the atmosphere, seeds were blown in from regions where flowers and plants bloomed, or were carried in by birds, and later distributed by the four-footed creatures. Then verdure sprang into life; the gentle grasses and flowers began to cover the slopes and level places where soil had gathered, and the trees came to sway and swing in the breezes, and sing their songs of coming life to the hitherto barren rocks.

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