As its servant, at its bidding, I write this, and shall now unfold, and in the course of this narrative give to the world a surprising revelation of the power of ancient Aztec idols, which would be incredible in the light of our twentieth century of Christian civilization if it were not sustained by the evidence of undeniable facts.

Our road led through a hilly country toward the Little Colorado River.  In the distance loomed the San Francisco Mountains, extinct craters which had belched fire and lava long, long ago at the birth of Arizona, when the earth was still in the travail of creation.  We forded the Little Colorado at Sunset Crossing, a lonely colony, where a few Mormons were the only inhabitants of a vast area of wilderness.  We were headed due west toward a mesa rising abruptly from the plateau which we were then traversing.  This mesa was again capped by a chain of lofty peaks, one of the Mogollon mountain ranges.  We ascended the towering mesa through the difficult Chavez pass, which is named after its discoverer, the noted Mexican, Colonel Francisco Chavez, who may be remembered as a representative in Congress of the United States, for the Territory of New Mexico.  A day’s heavy toil brought us to the summit of the mesa, which was a beautiful place, but unspeakably lonesome.  This wonderful highland is a malpais or lava formation and densely covered with a forest of stately pines and mountain juniper.  Strange to say, vegetation thrives incredibly in the rocky lava; a knee-high growth of the most nutritious grama grasses, indigent to this region, rippled in the breeze like waves of a golden sea and we saw numerous signs of deer, antelope, and turkey.  Our road, a mere trail, wound over this plateau, which was a veritable impenetrable jungle in places, a part of the great Coconino forest.  Think and wonder!  An unbroken forest of ten thousand square miles, it is said to be the most extensive woodland on the face of the globe.  This trail was the worst road to travel I have seen or expect ever to pass over.  The wagons moved as ships tossed on a stormy sea, chuck! chuck! from boulder to boulder, without intermittence.  We found delicious spring water about noon and passed a most remarkable place later in the day.  This must have been the pit of a volcano.  A few steps aside from the road you might lean over the precipice and look straight down into a great, round crater, so deep that it made a person dizzy.  At the bottom there was a ranch house, a small lake and a cultivated field, the whole being apparently ten acres in area.  I looked straight down on a man who was walking near the house and appeared no larger than a little doll and his dog seemed to be the size of a grasshopper, but we heard the dog bark and heard the cackling of hens quite plainly.  On one side of this pit there was a break in the formation, which made this curious place accessible by trail.