"White Dove of the Desert"

...And that unbelievable altar—all the worn old browns in the scale, with an underlay of glimmering gold—saints in niches with pale, long, delicate, Spanish faces, and ecstatically uplifted black eyes, designs with rabbits, serpents, symbolic intaglio, rich mosaics of painting, and everywhere the beautiful scallop-shell of Saint James, favorite emblem of the Guiona brothers, architects, under whose direction the church was built...

...Past the mud huts of Indians we rattle to the mission gate where the padre sits sunning himself in that fierce brilliance...

...And looking back, down the length of the nave, one's eyes leap aloft to the great sea-shells of the ceiling between the noble swoops of arch, discolored, the padre tells us, by colonies of bats during the secularization, but exquisitely patterned below in swimming lines of copper-green, blue and a mellow, buff-lightened rose...

...18 THE COMMONWEAL May 8, 1929 "WHITE DOVE OF THE DESERT" By CHRISTINE TURNER CURTIS UNDER the blistering sun on the parched Arizona plateau she spreads her snow-white wings, San Xavier del Bac, the mission church of Tucson...

...And then one climbs the scorching, calcium-white towers and looks thoughtfully out upon the baked plateau, the round, oven-like houses of the Indians, the brown mountains and the pearly, treacherous contortions of the "cholla," and one reflects, not without a twinge of dismay, on that bygone mating of artistic and religious passion, wondering if our earth shall ever see its like again...

...For here, in striking contrast to the simplicity of the California missions, a profuse Latinized, Romanesque fancy runs riot: scroll and carved ornament, elaborate figure and device—a wealth of old-world decoration facing the new world of desert...

...Inside the wall one is immediately struck with the opulence, the intricacy of the "fachada," sand-colored between the piercingly white towers with their iron balconies and prickly-topped summits...

...And as one passes again into the glare and paces the walk to the small mortuary chapel in the arid close, with stations of the cross set medallion-like in red sandstone in the walls, one is thrown into a profound abstraction, meditating on that miracle of human imagination which was able to bring to a flowering in this waste land the rich blossom of old-world art: the type of mind that resided in those early Spanish visionaries who so burningly adored the graceful and the elegant that they could bend to their will the stolid Indian workmen, could mollify their stark and angular idiom and melt and conform it to the lacy, the intertwined, the suave—and so spirit from the desert this mighty burgeoning of curve and color, those pure inspired scallops, those moving concavities and crescendoes...

...Blazing white under blazing blue she crouches on the waterless plain, thrust up into the very disc of the sun, between lumped mountains, imperturbable and aloof among dry gardens of cacti, dust-covered and grisly...