A drawing of the Statue of Liberty bears the words "It is I who took the first steps toward you"; a Bible is accompanied by the declaration "It was left to Giotto to jot"; phallic forms of desert mesas come with the phrase "Offering my utmost."

Dalea emoryi, common names dyebush, white dalea, or Emory's indigo bush, is a perennial legume shrub or subshrub common to the desert mesas of the southern part of the U.S. states of Arizona and California, and regions of the Mexican state of Baja California.

After almost 60 years of intense, if highly speculative, scholarly scrutiny, it is hard to tell which is the greater mystery: Why the valley-dwelling Nazcan people would decorate the surrounding desert mesas with figures so large their shapes could not even be discerned before the age of aviation 2,000 years later.

On the high desert mesas of the Navajo reservation, known for its pedestals of sculpted rock, the amenities of modern life are few.

Steamboat Mountain and other desert mesas or buttes provide seeps and springs that serve as a water source for small streams such as Jack Morrow Creek.

With the earth they removed from these canyons, they built great flat-topped mounds that dot the horizon like the desert mesas of the Southwest.

As an airconditioner purred quietly in a seventh-floor Federal courtroom, Navajo and Hopi voices rose over an ancient land dispute that stretches back before Kit Carson, before the Spanish conquistadors and beyond recorded time in the high desert mesas east of the Grand Canyon.

So we plunged north through the Monument Valley, with its striking desert mesas and rock sculptures made by God or geology or both.

Outside, beyond a palm-treed resort oasis, lies a protected landscape of desert mesas.