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AST from Wilcox we followed the line of the Southern Pacific as far as Bowie, and then turned north again, through a huge, empty red valley. All along our way the cactus and mesquite grew in a luxuriance that told eloquently how fertile the soil would be under the magic touch of a plow and water. It was a bad road. however, little traveled, and would have been very tedious had not a wonderful desert sunset beguiled us with cloudcolorings of unbelievable glory. When the sun dropped far enough past the horizon, however, the colors faded like a flash. After that it was dull traveling through the desert night over seemingly endless miles of brush lands.

All at once we came in the darkness to a transformation very similar to the one at Phoenix. We reached the bottomlands of the Gila River, above Safford, where the same magic of the irrigation ditch had done its work, and level fields of grain and alfalfa told of another farming paradise.

The Gila is not a lovable stream, nor a beautiful one, but given to terrific outbursts of rage in which it defies the efforts of the road builders to keep it bridged. The automobile traveler has little cause to love the Gila, yet we could almost forgive its antipathy to bridges after seeing the little valley of farms that it mothers in a relenting mood along its banks from Solomonville to Pima.

Safford is a beautiful little town, almost under the shadow of towering Mount Graham, on the north slopes of which a few streaks of snow still defied the summer sun.

Safford is a town that somehow seems to have been granted a ticket to a preliminary performance of the millennium. There is a large air of peacefulness, of quiet and good-nature about Safford. There is no one very rich there and no one very poor. It is not on the way to becoming a large city, because there is just so much water in the river, and so much land that the irrigating ditche will reach.

There is irrigated country along the Gila all the way down to Fort Thomas, then a weary desert again. Presently we came to the gateway to the San Carlos Indian reservation. Uncle Sam takes no chances on boot-leggers bringing fire-water to his wards on the San Carlos, and the Indian police searched our belongings with a thoroughness that was almost hopeful rather than official. Fi miles or so down the road we were stopped and searched again, even to our spare tires, which were tested to make sure that they contained air instead of whisky.

Some 20 miles past the reservation line we came to another perfectly good concrete bridge that partly sparned the Gila. Like the one at Florence, it was a good bridge, but a trifle short at both ends. So down the river we went for several miles, over a bad road, to a ford near the San Carlos Indian agency. The ford leads across a wide sandy bottom-real sand, too, and a hard pull for any car. Before we entered the sand came an Apach: boy galloping wildly across on a little Indian pony. "Pu"

you across for a dollar," he offered. We looked at the sand and declined. "All right, you get stuck, five dollars," he warned; but greatly to his disappointment we pulled through without difficulty. Many a car does get stuck, however, and the Gila crossing is a distinct source of income to the Apaches.

A short distance past the ford of the Gila the road passes through the barracks for the troops and the headquarters of the officials of the San Carlos reservation. It is quiet enough there nowadays, but time was when keeping the festive Apache on the reservation was not to be classed as an indoor sport. The Apache of 30 years ago unquestionably had his faults, but he at least gave a number of American military heroes a lot of excellent training, and a very good opportunity to show what they were made of, among them "Black Jack" Pershing, General Leonard Wood, Lawton who died in the Philippines, and many other famous fighters.

A good road but an uninteresting one took us from the reservation to Globe, one of Arizona's greatest copper camps. Globe is flushed with war-time prosperity, a feverish activity very different from the peaceful current of life in Safford. There were rumors abroad of labor troubles, and a strike was impending that has since materialized. Miners are like the free-booters in the train of Cortez or Pizarro. They are the common soldiers in the raid on Nature's store-houses and they are constantly exercised over the fact that the capitalists who lead them in the struggle are getting a larger share of the spoils than they.

From Globe to Miami, six miles away, we traveled next morning over the only concrete road that we encountered in Arizona outside of the city limits of some of the larger towns. Miami is a much younger town than Globe, but the same feverish war-time prosperity prevails there as at Globe. Eight years ago Miami was a peaceful sheeppasture. Last year they mined $33,000,000 worth of copper there, so their loss of the wool production is scarcely noticed.

Though the concrete road ends at Miami, good dirt road ensues. Half-way on the 40-mile stretch between Globe and the Roosevelt Dam the road climbs to the summit of the Pinal range and gives the traveler a wonderful panorama over Roosevelt Lake. The Roosevelt Dam is built at the junction of the Salt and Tonto rivers, and the impounded waters back up for 30 miles in what was formerly the bed of the streams.

From the summit of the Pinals the road drops 1600 feet in seven miles and presently follows along the shores of Roosevelt Lake. The waters of the lake, strangely blue, wash the feet of the naked desert hills. They seem utterly out of place in that thirsty land, and one can almost believe that they are nothing but a mirage of the desert that will presently disappear with the changing tides of the air. The great dam the British built on the Nile at Assouan swallowed in its waters an ancient Egyptian city, but the Roosevelt Dam did not destroy the relics of former dwellers of this region. High in the red cliffs of the mountains above the lake the cliff-dwellings that housed a vanished

race look down on a miracle wrought by mightier builders, a miracle that doubtless will in turn be dwarfed by the achievement of builders to come.

Past the dam the road follows close beside the swift waters of Salt River that run in a volume measured to the will of man instead of the will of the torrential desert storms. It is not a good road, though, it must be regretfully recorded. In the days when the government was building the dam it was a perfect road. Lack of adequate maintenance since the completion of the dam and a heavy automobile traffic have resulted in a rocky, deeply rutted road that will not give the driver of the car much leisure to observe the scenery.

The aforesaid scenery is well worth observing all the way along this portion of the road. The road leaves the river and climbs to the summit of Fish Creek Canyon, giving a last glimpse of the silver waters of Salt River disappearing through a gap in a wall of fantastic mountains. Down wonderful Fish Creek Canyon under strangely colored pinnacles of stone, past the little station where the stages stop for luncheon, and up the great Fish Creek Hill where the road climbs under appalling walls of red rock, the traveler will find interest and beauty every foot

of the way.

Those who know Arizona will assure you that the name "Apache Trail" is

more real than fanciful. Between Superstition Mountain and Fish Creek Hill they will point out to you Mormon Flat, where an entire emigrant train of Mormons was massacred by Apaches. They will show you Apache Gap, where a pitched battle was fought between Apaches and United States cavalry only 30 years ago. It is hard for the automobile traveler to believe that he is riding in safety and cushioned comfort over roads that were strewn with deadly perils such a little while ago.

The blue bulk of Superstition Mountain that looms on the traveler's left as he emerges from the hills to the floor of the Salt River Valley is rather stranger than the average Arizona mountain. Flat-topped, with beetling cliffs, and isolated obelisks of stone that rise beside them, it is not strange that Superstition Mountain was an object of awe to the valley tribes of Indians. Past its frowning cliffs so many of their wa parties went on the way to battle with the fierce hill tribes, and never returned, that they conceived the evil-looking mountain to have something to do with their ill-fortune.

A long straight road over the flat desert leads back to the irrigated country which commences some four miles east of Mesa. Perhaps the irrigated land gains an undue advantage by contrast with the miles of desert that surround it, but certainly it is that no farm land anywhere ever looked more beautiful.

Next morning we left Phoenix very early for we were bound for Yuma. It is 196 miles from Phoenix to Yuma, and at present there are about 100 of those miles that will cause the traveler to wish very devotedly that he had taken

some other route. And no matter how early he starts he will wish that he had started a little earlier when a mid-day sun finds him wallowing in the powder-like silt "roads" of the Palomas country.

For the first 50 miles or so out of Phoenix everything is lovely. The road leads through the irrigated lands, and the traveler gets a very good idea of the magnitude of the area that the Roosevelt Dam furnishes with water. We splashed across a shallow ford at the Agua river, and saw where the state highway forces were building a huge embankment to carry the road to a bridge that it is hoped will keep the impulsive Agua Fria from imposing a serious bar to motor travel as it has frequently done in the past.

A great disappointment awaited us at the crossing of the Hassayampa River, 43 miles out of Phoenix. The river was nothing but a dry bed of sand. Arizona tradition has it that whoever drinks of the waters of the Hassayampa can never tell the truth again, and we were planning on imbibing enough of the magic liquid to insure us careers of uninterrupted mendacity for the rest of our lives. We were forced to pass on, however, without being able to reinforce our natural talents in that direction.

The water of the Hassayampa evidently had a stimulating effect on the imagination of the aborigine also, for a rocky hill that borders its banks has its black boulders plentifully illustrated with "picture writing." Whether any attempt has ever been made to deciper these hieroglyphics we do not know, but even if they should prove to be

historical records of the greatest apparent value, no true Arizonan would ever place the slightest credence in them. They are entirely too close to the Hassayampa.

Soon after passing the Hassayampa the desert begins. It is real desert, too, and from all appearances it will stay desert until the end of time. Rolling, rocky hills, waterless and utterly forbidding, it is the grimmest country that the tourist will find in Arizona, to our way of thinking. Even

if water were available the soil would not be fit for cultivation. There is something depressing about mile after mile of country that you know is wicked past redemption, and that will blister forever for its sins.

After forty or fifty miles of this sort of going, we emerged from the hills into the bottomlands of the Gila River east of Agua Caliente. Out of all the miles of desert road that we had traveled we instantly and unanimously elected this the most execrable. The soil is a silt as fine as bolted flour. The road cuts into two deep ruts, that are thickly sown with the powdery dust. The ruts hold deep chuck-holes that the powdery dust completely conceals, and your wheels will drop into unexpected "thankyou-ma'ams" that will rack your car from end to end.

Agua Caliente lies under the brow of a black desert hill. There are hot