The man on the porch was not thirty-eight years old. Nez saw that in the first moment, before Crane had even stepped down off the wagon. The man who climbed down slowly into the summer dust of the trading post yard in the summer of 1912 was sixty, and more than sixty. His hair had gone white and thin.

His hands trembled. His shoulders had rounded forward, and he moved the way a man moves who has been standing outside all winter with no coat on. Four years earlier, in the summer of 1908, Sylvanus Crane had been thirty-four, a tall, thin naturalist from Boston with round wire spectacles and letters of introduction from a professor at Harvard and the American Antiquarian Society. He had come west by rail as far as the rail would carry him, then by wagon and hired man, then by a private wagon he bought outright when no hired man would take him where he wanted to go.

He arrived at the trading post south of Chinle on a Tuesday afternoon, carrying more than any single man should have owned: two long trunks, three large boxes of dry plates for photography, a tripod, a square camera in a leather case with brass fittings, a smaller camera he called a reconnaissance instrument, a brass barometer, a folding table, two lanterns, a rifle he never once cocked in all the days Nez was with him, and a small mahogany box bound in iron that never left his sight. Ashwell, the post’s owner, a man in his late fifties with one milky eye from an old mule kick, had Crane figured out inside of ten minutes: a great deal of money and no clear idea what to do with it out there. Ashwell set a price for a guide, slightly high. Crane paid it without a blink.

Nez was twenty-two that summer, living with his people’s camp a half day’s ride south of the post. He had known Ashwell and his wife Dela since he was eleven. It was Ashwell who put Crane in front of him, telling the naturalist that Nez had guided a party of surveyors two years back and brought them all home, and that he knew every wash and shelf of rock for a hundred miles in any direction. On the porch that first evening, Crane unfolded a piece of butcher paper covered in pencil marks copied from something.

Some of the copies were close. Some were wrong in a way that made Nez uncomfortable to look at, the way it makes you uncomfortable to hear someone try to say your family’s name and miss it by a syllable. When Nez asked where the paper came from, Crane said a man in Santa Fe, whose father had been a young surveyor in that country, had brought back what he could copy, in 1842. Father and son were both dead.

“I’ll take you as far as the second ridge past the red wash,” Nez said. “There are markings there. Old ones. I’ll show you those.

”

“And beyond that? ” Crane asked. “We don’t go beyond that. ”

They rode out two mornings later, Crane’s wagon too heavy for the country, refusing to leave anything behind.

On the second day they left the wagon at a low spring and packed what they could onto the two horses. Crane did not complain. He was the kind of man, Nez later said, who had decided that no matter what happened, he would not complain. That is not the same as being at ease.

It is the opposite of being at ease. It is the sound a rope makes just before it lets go. They traveled for three days. Nez showed him the first set of markings on a low shelf near a dry wash.

Crane photographed and drew and wrote in his notebook, and he did not touch the marks. Nez noted this and said nothing. On the fourth day they reached the second ridge. Below them lay a long, shallow basin, and on the far side another line of rock rising into red walls that turned in on themselves.

Pretty country, Nez said. That was part of the trouble with it. “Do not go into the basin,” Nez said. “Why?

”

“My grandfather did not go there. He said not to go there. He was a serious man. I do not go where he said not to go.

”

“But you have never been there yourself,” Crane said. “No. ”

“Then how can you know? ”

“Because he told me not to,” Nez said, and added, “Please.

”

Crane heard it. It went in and hit something. Behind the apology that came back out was the same thing that had been behind everything he had done since he got off the train. “I have to go,” he said.

“I have to see it. ” He said it the way a man says he has to breathe. “If you go, I will wait for you here three nights,” Nez said. “That is all.

If you are not back on the fourth morning, I will go home. ”

Crane thanked him, shook his hand, and asked Nez to keep an eye on the mahogany box. He gave him the key, and told him if he did not come back, Nez should take the box and burn it. Then he walked down into the basin with his camera, his tripod, three glass plates in a leather satchel, one canteen, and a smaller bag Nez did not see the inside of.

He did not take the rifle. Nez remembered that later. The first day passed quietly. Nez sat under a lean-to of oilcloth rigged in the shade of a rock, watching the basin.

He could see Crane, a small dark shape moving across the pale ground, stopping, crouching over something, disappearing for an hour behind a fold of land. In the late afternoon the wind rose and a curtain of pale red dust went across the basin, and when it settled, Nez could not see him. He watched until dusk. He did not see him come out.

On the second day the basin was empty. In the evening he heard a sound like someone striking a hammer against stone, very far away, in short spaced beats. He counted without meaning to. Nineteen, then a stop, then nineteen more.

He did not sleep that night. He built a fire and faced it and did not turn around, a habit his grandfather had taught him. When you are alone in country, you do not turn. What is behind you cannot be changed by looking at it.

You only teach it to look back. On the third night he heard something else. It was not the wind. It was not a coyote.

It was not any animal he had a name for. It came from the direction of the basin, only once, a sound like a man drawing breath through a length of pipe left too long in the sun. He heard it, and the fire went low, and he did not put more wood on it for a long moment, because he did not want the thing that had made that sound to see him well. On the fourth morning, Crane came back.

He came up out of the basin walking, though his feet knew where they were and the rest of him did not seem sure. He was sunburned in patterns: long clean lines down the sides of his face, a dark oval on the back of one hand, a crescent from the base of his throat up under his ear, like the mark you would make pressing the edge of a coin against something soft. His spectacles were in his shirt pocket, snapped in two places at the frame. Without them, his eyes looked at things a little to the left of where they were, and stayed there.

Nez gave him water and bread. Crane took the bread and held it, did not eat it. “Thank you,” he said, very carefully, as if he had rehearsed it on the walk up. He had found what he was looking for.

He did not want to rest. He wanted to go now. He looked back over his shoulder at the basin once, and in that look, Nez said, his face was the face of a man saying goodbye to something he was not sure was letting him leave. They rode back slower than they had come.

Crane could not sit a horse well. He kept listening to one side. That first evening on the plain side of the second ridge, he came awake all at once from a doze and said there was a man. “Standing among the rocks on the far wall watching me work.

” When Nez asked what he looked like, Crane thought about it. “Like me. ” Later he said, “No. He looked like the walls.

” He said this last part very calmly, the way a man says the coffee is cold. The next day he was better and worse. Better because he could ride. Worse because he began to talk and did not stop.

Some of it was ordinary, the way a man talks to keep himself company on a horse. Some of it was not. He told Nez that the paintings in the basin had not been old. “What do you mean?

” Nez asked. “They were wet. The way a fresh coat of paint is wet. When I touched them with the tip of a pencil, the pencil came away with red on it.

I put the pencil in my pocket. I have it here. ” He patted his coat, and something in the pocket answered with a small dry sound, like a pebble in a tin cup. Near the end of the day he said he had been standing among the rocks the whole time.

“He was in every photograph I took, whether I saw him or not. I know that now. ” He said he liked being photographed. “I think he had been waiting for someone with a camera for a long time.

”

They reached the trading post on the ninth day out. Ashwell looked at Crane and said nothing. Dela made him sit at her kitchen table and drink two cups of coffee and eat a bowl of stew, and did not speak until he was done. “You should stay here a week.

” Crane said he wanted to be on the train tomorrow. He pressed a small leather purse into Nez’s hand. It held more money than he had been promised by half again. He also gave Nez the small mahogany box.

“Keep this. I am not going to burn it. It is empty now. ”

“Empty of what?

” Nez asked. “Empty,” Crane said, and did not answer the second part of the question. “If you would like to open it and see, you have the key. ”

Nez put the box in his bedroll and did not open it for eleven years.

When he did open it, it was empty. That is what he said. Crane left the next morning on the wagon back to the rail. Nez rode out to his family camp instead, because he did not want to see the man’s face again in the daylight.

For a while nothing came of it. A month went by, then two. Nez rode fence for a rancher named Ephraim Willis through the fall and helped his cousins with the sheep in the spring. Then, in the summer of 1909, a letter came for him at the trading post from Boston.

Crane wrote his letters very small and very tight and very even, the way a man writes who is trying to hold himself together with a pen. Crane had developed his plates himself, one at a time, in a rented darkroom in the basement of a friend’s house, because he had not wanted anyone else’s eyes on them until he had seen them. On the first plate, taken at the mouth of the basin, he saw only the rocks. On the second, taken a little further in, he saw the rocks, and something like a man standing in the shadow of a boulder in the middle distance.

He had not seen him when he took the picture. On the third plate the man was closer. On the fourth, closer still. On the fifth plate, taken with the camera turned away from where the man had been standing, the man was standing behind the camera.

He was standing behind me, Crane wrote. He was standing where I had been standing. Nez wrote back, only that he should come back to Arizona, but not now. Come when you have decided you are ready.

When you decide, I will meet you. He wrote nothing else, because there was nothing else he was sure of. He did not tell Crane not to burn the plates. He knew Crane would not burn the plates.

Crane was not the kind of man who burned things he had made. Letters continued. Through the fall of 1909 they came once a month, then more often. Crane wrote that he had begun to hear things in his house at night, not loud, only the sound of a small object being set down on a wooden surface from time to time in another room.

He could not identify the object or the surface. He thought it was a pencil. In the winter he wrote that his housekeeper, a woman named Wilfred Strand, who had kept his rooms for eleven years, told him she would not be back. She had seen something in a mirror in the hall.

She had not been willing to describe it. She said only, “That is not a face I know how to look at,” and left, and did not come back for her wages, and would not open her door when he called. Crane wrote, “I have set the mirror facing the wall now. I do not use that hall.

”

Through 1910 and 1911 the letters came thinner, long spaces between them, sometimes only three or four lines. Crane wrote about being followed on the street. A chair in his study that would be in the wrong position when he came home. Waking to the smell of dust and hot stone in a house in Boston in January.

A photograph he had taken of the front of his own building out of a sort of desperate scientific curiosity, and the figure standing in the doorway when he developed the plate, though no one had been standing there when he took the picture. He had begun to sleep with two lamps burning, and to keep them burning through the day as well. He wrote that he thought the figure was not coming closer any longer. He thought it was waiting for him to come to it.

In the spring of 1912 a letter came that was different. “I am coming back. I have taken something out of that country and I mean to give it back. If I am not the one to give it back, I will die and it will be given back for me by the country itself, and that is not a thing I want.

Please meet me at the trading post on the 28th of June. ”

Crane came back on the 27th, a day early. Dela saw him first, came out onto the porch with her hand at her collar, and called Nez, who had been sleeping in the shade of the barn. Nez came around the corner and stopped.

The man who came off that wagon was not thirty-eight. That man was more than sixty, white-haired, trembling, shoulders forward. Ashwell came out and, a man who had known bad shape all his life, did not know what to say. He said, “Mr.

Crane,” and took him by the elbow and helped him inside. Crane slept for two days. He drank water and ate little. On the third morning he asked to speak to Nez alone, behind the barn in the shade, because he could not bear the sun on his face.

He had brought back with him from the basin something small he had not meant to. He had noticed it three days after getting home, in the pocket of his coat, and could not remember picking it up. A small piece of stone, no bigger than the pad of his thumb, the color of dried blood. He had put it on his desk, and it had stayed there for four years.

He had tried three times to throw it away. Each time, he woke the next morning to find it back on his desk in a slightly different position. He had not thrown it away a fourth time. He had decided to bring it back.

He took a small tin box out of his coat and set it on the ground between them. He asked Nez to take him to the second ridge again, to wait there again, and if he was not back by the third morning to leave without him, to throw the tin box and its contents over the ridge into the basin, and go home. “If I do that,” Nez said, “you will die there. ”

“I know,” Crane said.

“I will take you,” Nez said. They rode out the next day. Dela gave them extra water. Ashwell shook Crane’s hand and did not meet his eye, and Nez saw Ashwell put a small tin cross into Crane’s shirt pocket, and Crane accepted it without looking at it.

The ride was slow. Crane could not sit the horse for long stretches, so they stopped often and camped early. On the second night, at a hollow of red sand where Nez had camped a hundred times, Crane asked, “Do you believe I made this happen? ” Nez said he did not know.

“Do you believe that place would have let anyone in and out? ” He did not know. “Do you think if I had never gone there, none of this would have happened? ”

“That I do know,” Nez said.

“If you had not gone there, you would be at home in Boston cleaning your glasses. ”

Crane laughed softly once. “Yes. I miss my glasses.

” Then he said, “Thank you for telling me the truth. ” And he did not talk again that night. They came to the second ridge on the fourth day, in the middle of the afternoon. The basin lay below them the way it had four years earlier, but the light, Nez said, did not feel the same.

It seemed thin. Watered down. The basin had the look, from above, of a place holding its breath. Crane sat on the ridge for a long time.

Then he stood up and took the tin box out of his pocket. “Thank you for staying with me this far,” he said. “Three mornings,” Nez said. “I will wait three mornings.

”

“If I come back at all, it will be the first morning. If it is not the first morning, it will not be me. Do not wait past the third morning. Whatever you hear, do not come down for me.

Do you understand? ”

“Yes. ”

“Promise me. ”

“I promise.

”

Crane walked down into the basin, the walk of a man who has said what he needed to say and is going to do the work of walking. He did not look back. He grew smaller, and smaller still, and then he was down there moving across the pale ground toward the far wall, and Nez sat down cross-legged on the ridge and watched him go. On the first day he watched the small shape cross the basin and reach the far wall and stand at its base for what must have been an hour.

Then it moved along the wall and disappeared into a fold in the rock. Nez did not see him come out. That night he built his fire, faced it, did not turn. Around midnight the sound came again, the same one from four years earlier, a man drawing breath through a pipe left too long in the sun.

It came from the basin, only once, a slow long drawing in, and then it stopped, and there was no sound of anything letting the breath back out. Toward morning Nez felt something at the back of his neck, the way you feel a small cool draft when a door has been opened somewhere behind you. He did not turn. He went on facing the fire.

The draft stayed a long moment, then went away and did not come back. On the second day nothing moved in the basin. Crane did not come out of the fold. Late in the afternoon Nez thought he saw on the far wall a small dark shape that had not been there before.

He rubbed his eyes. It was still there, dark against the pale rock, where the fold came out again higher up. He watched it until dark. It did not move, not once.

The second night, the sound did not come. Nothing came. That, Nez said, was worse. On the third morning, Nez broke his promise.

He said this plainly when he told the story, years later. “I have thought about it every year of my life since. I do not know if I did right. I do not think a man can know a thing like that, but I broke my promise.

”

He went down on foot, leading his horse, taking his rifle and a canteen and nothing else. When he was halfway across the basin, the wind stopped. Not slowed. Stopped.

A small dry wind had been moving over the ground the whole time, and at the halfway point it stopped, and the air went still and stayed still for the rest of the time he was down there. He said the air smelled like a hot stove that has been standing empty. No other words fit. He came to the base of the far wall and looked up at the small dark shape.

It was not a bird. It was not a shadow. It was not a mark on the rock. He did not say what it was.

He said only, “I have not spoken of that shape aloud to anyone, and I will not speak of it now. ”

He went along the base of the wall to the fold in the rock and went in. Inside, the wall opened into a small chamber the size of a modest room, lit from above by a crack in the rock overhead. The walls were covered in markings.

Some were old. Some, Nez said, were not old. He did not say more. On the ground near the back wall was Crane’s coat, folded once neatly.

Beside it, the small leather satchel, empty and open. Beside that, the tripod folded and set on end. Beside that, the wooden case of the camera, open. The camera itself was gone.

In front of the coat, a small set of items had been laid out in a straight line: the broken spectacles in a small clean pile; Ashwell’s tin cross laid flat; the tin box open with nothing in it; and a pencil, the one Crane had told him about four years before on the ride back, with a small dry crust of red on the tip. The pencil was pointing at the back wall. On the back wall there was a new painting, fresh, not yet dry, made from something Nez did not identify and did not try to identify. It was the figure of a man standing looking out.

The man wore the coat that was folded on the ground. His face was Crane’s face, though older and thinner, set in a look Nez said he had seen once or twice on the faces of dying men, and would rather not describe. The man in the painting was looking straight out of the wall at the person looking at him. Nez was that person.

He said the painting looked at him. Not the way an image looks, but the way a person looks. He could feel it looking. He turned around slowly and walked out of the fold, along the base of the wall, back across the basin, and up the loose slope on the other side.

He did not run. He said that if he had run, the thing in the fold would have known he could be made to run, and it would have followed him. He came back to his camp, got on his horse, and rode north for two days without stopping longer than the horse would allow. He did not turn around.

He did not look at the country behind him. He came home, and he never went into that country again. He never told anyone about it from the summer of 1912 until the sixth night he sat on his porch in the summer of 1955, when he told it to a visitor who had come out to Arizona to gather stories from men and women old enough to remember when the roads were made of rain and rutted dirt. He was seventy years old that summer.

He lived alone in a small stone and timber house near a rise of red rock, about a day’s drive south of Chinle. He did not speak much, and when he did, he spoke slowly and did not look at the person he was speaking to. His eyes went to the ground or off toward the rim of a mesa, as if the story he was telling lived out there, and he was only picking the words up from where they fell. He mentioned the story on the fifth evening.

On the sixth, he told it. He told it, he said, only because he was tired, and because the man in the story deserved a name spoken aloud somewhere in the world, and because there was no one else left living who had known him. He asked the visitor to change one thing when writing it down: not to say the name of the valley. The visitor kept that promise, calling it what Nez called it when he had to call it something: the painted place.

When he was finished, Nez was quiet for a while. Then he said, “I did not do right to leave that painting there. I did not do right to leave that man there. But I could not have carried what I had seen out of that place.

If I had turned back to the wall, I would have been on it. That is how I felt then. That is how I feel now. ”

He said, “Do not go looking for the basin.

Do not ask Dela if she is still living, because she is old, and I do not want her last few years spent thinking about what was on that wall. Do not print the name of it. ”

“Do you know what a man wants at the end of his life? ” he asked.

“He wants to have hurt no one. He wants to have kept his promises. In my life I have kept most of my promises, but I broke the one to Sylvanus Crane. I went down for him, and I did not go far enough.

”

Then he turned to the visitor. It was the first and last time he looked at him while telling the story. “I have thought about it every day. I have not decided.

I do not know if there was any going far enough. I do not know if I could have brought him back. ” He said, “I do not think so. ” Then he said, “But I would like to be wrong.

”

That was the end of what he told. They sat a little while. Then he took the cups and went inside, and the visitor heard him fold up his blankets. The next morning they did not speak of it, and the visitor went home.

What happened to the plates Sylvanus Crane took, or to the man who took them, or to the country they were taken from, is not known. Only this: Hastin Nez believed at seventy that some part of a man he had once guided was still in a chamber in the wall of a basin in Arizona, looking out. He said he would like to be wrong.

He was never sure he was.