One more. A secret flower, a hidden special, little known, seldom publicized: the desert prince’s plume, Stanleya pinnata, a man-high plant that blooms from May to July in some of the hottest, dreariest, most godforsaken and otherwise life-forsaken places in the Southwest. In dried-out mud flats along arid watercourses; on the shale and gravel talus slopes under a Moenkopi-formation rock bluff; around the alkaline edges of some desperate mudhole way out in the clay hills, the badlands, the Painted Desert. The flowers stand up in golden spikes, racemes of bright yellow blazing against the red cliffs and blue sky.

In those secret canyon glens where the hanging gardens grow, nourished on water percolating through the sandstone, you’ll find yellow columbine. Certainly as beautiful a flower as anything on earth, though not so large and spectacular as the blue columbine of the mountains. Many others live here too, delicate as angel’s breath, and tough. They’ve got to be tough, surviving in those precarious perches on a perpendicular slickrock wall.

And then you walk out in the badlands and see a single Indian paintbrush lifting its cup of salmon-colored, petallike bracts toward the sky. The paintbrush too is beautiful, with the special and extraordinary beauty of wild and lonely things. Every desert flower shares that quality. Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could live, enduring extremes of heat and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, among burnt rock and shifting sands, any such creature—beast, bird or flower—testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent in all forms of life. Including the human. Even in us.

EVERYWHERE YOU GO in the southwestern deserts you come across drawings on the rocks, on the canyon walls. Some are inscribed into the rock—petroglyphs. Some are painted on the rock—pictographs. All of them, pictographs and petroglyphs alike, present an odd and so-far-untranslated language. If it is a language.

Not that the pictures are always hard to understand. Most consist of recognizable figures: deer, bighorn sheep, antelope, sometimes a mastodon (extinct no more than ten thousand years in North America), serpents, centipedes, rain clouds, the sun, dancing humans, warriors with shields and lances, even men on horseback—representations that cannot be more than four hundred years old, when the Spaniards introduced the horse to North America.

Some of the pictures, however, are disturbingly strange. We see semi-human figures with huge blank eyes, horned heads. Ghostly shapes resembling men, but without feet or legs, float on the air. Humanlike forms with helmets and goggles wave tentacles at us. What can they be? Gods? Goddesses? Cosmonauts from the Betelgeuse neighborhood? Here’s a fighter with shield painted red, white and blue—the all-American man. And still other forms appear, completely nonrepresentational, totally abstract symbols of…of what? Nobody knows. The American Indians of today, if they know, aren’t telling. Probably they are as mystified by them as we are. In any case the culture of the modern Native Americans has little connection with the culture of the vanished rock artists. The continuity was broken long ago.