The scene had not only its charms, but its marvels.  Besides the grand environment of plateaus and mountains in the distance, there were near at hand freaks of nature such as one might look for in the moon.  Nowhere perhaps has the great water erosion of bygone aeons wrought more grotesquely and fantastically than in the Moqui basin.  To the west rose a series of detached buttes, presenting forms of castles, towers, and minarets, which looked more like the handiwork of man than the pueblo itself.  There were piles of variegated sandstone, some of them four hundred feet in height, crowned by a hundred feet of sombre trap.  Internal fire had found vent here; its outflowings had crystallized into columnar trap; the trap had protected the underlying sandstone from cycles of water-flow; thus had been fashioned these sublime donjons and pinnacles.

They were not only sublime but beautiful.  The sandstone, reduced by ages to a crumbling marl, was of all colors.  There were layers of green, reddish-brown, drab, purple, red, yellow, pinkish, slate, light-brown, orange, white, and banded.  Nature, not contented with building enchanted palaces, had frescoed them.  At this distance, indeed, the separate tints of the strata could not be discerned, but their general effect of variegation was distinctly visible, and the result was a landscape of the Thousand and One Nights.

To the south were groups of crested mounds, some of them resembling the spreading stumps of trees, and others broad-mouthed bells, all of vast magnitude.  These were of sandstone marl, the caps consisting of hard red and green shales, while the swelling boles, colored by gypsum, were as white as loaf-sugar.  It was another specimen of the handiwork of deluges which no man can number.

Far away to the southwest, and yet faintly seen through the crystalline atmosphere, were the many-colored knolls and rolls and cliffs of the Painted Desert.  Marls, shales, and sandstones, of all tints, were strewn and piled into a variegated vista of sterile splendor.  Here surely enchantment and glamour had made undisputed abode.

Lastly, Harvard’s Peabody museum has a watercolor painting of a Moqui woman from 1891 by artist Julian Scott.

Study of a woman of 2d mesa (Moqui) Shi-mo-pa-vi”. Portrait of older woman, pueblo in background.