THE NAME HAS a French ring to it, but "de Chelly" (de-SHAY) is neither French nor Spanish in origin. It derives from the Navajo word tsegi ("rock canyon") and is thus bilingually redundant: "Canyon of the Rock Canyon." Over the centuries, Spanish conquistadors tried to approximate the unfamiliar sound of the Navajo word, and it came out, in various documents, as Chelli, Chelle, Dechilli, and Chegui, among other renderings—and finally Chelly, which eventually became the preferred spelling.

Before the Navajo took up residence here sometime in the 1700s—or possibly earlier—Canyon de Chelly had been continuously inhabited by various other Indian groups for more than 2,000 years, including, and especially, the Anasazi. I've come here to research a book about the life and times of the

I've come here to research a book about the controversial frontier figure Kit Carson. "It's like this," Adam says. "We feel about Kit Carson the way Jews feel about Hitler."

controversial frontier figure Kit Carson, who arrived in Canyon de Chelly in the winter of 1864 on a scorched-earth mission to bring the Navajo to their knees. Carson's men rampaged through the canyon, torching cornfields, taking prisoners, and chopping down some 2,000 peach trees—the pride of the Navajo—that graced the canyon floor. The Navajo were sent on a 400-mile forced march, known as the Long Walk, and spent four years in bitter captivity in southeastern New Mexico before General William Tecumseh Sherman sent them home. The Navajo still talk about this tragedy as though it happened yesterday—and nowhere is its currency more keenly felt than at Canyon de Chelly, the high church of the tribe.

"It's like this," Adam says. "We feel about Carson the way Jews feel about Hitler."

While Carson was here, he vowed that "everything connected with the canyon will cease to be a mystery," but about that he was dead wrong. Canyon de Chelly still has an aura of intrigue and impregnability about it—which to certain people makes it irresistible. But how does one really describe the peculiar aesthetic of this fabulous sandstone labyrinth? What is it that draws more than 800,000 visitors every year?

Yes, it's beautiful, and every fine-art photographer from Edward Curtis to Ansel Adams has tried to coax its magical tricks of light onto film. But beauty alone isn't what makes it, in my mind, the marquee natural wonder of the Southwest. Since it's in Arizona, comparisons to the other canyon are perhaps inevitable, if a little flawed. Canyon de Chelly, people often say, is a scaled-down Grand Canyon, kinder and gentler, easier to absorb, mind-boggling but not quite mind-blowing. This is true, I suppose, but I'm more inclined to take the comparison in the direction of Manhattan architecture: If the Grand Canyon is the brutishly macho Empire State Building, de Chelly is the Chrysler—smaller, yes, but also finer, more intricate, more sinuously feminine.

Here's the main difference, though: Canyon de Chelly is a rock world with a human pulse. To an extent impractical throughout most of the Grand Canyon, people live here, and have lived here for thousands of years. The place is crammed with memories, good and bad. Because the water running through it is not a raging torrent but rather a gentle stream percolating along the sandy floor, the canyon has always supported culture, with farming and domesticated animals and huddled lodges tucked safely among its myriad notches and alcoves. The entire length of it is strewn with ruins, many of them world-class sites that over the decades have attracted some of the lions of archaeology, people like Earl Morris and A. V. Kidder. And everywhere, painted and pecked high on the luminous copper-hued walls, is the art of the ancients.

Adam and I have planned various angles of approach—by Jeep, on foot, and on horseback, crisscrossing this riddle of geology any number of ways. That's the kind of place Canyon de Chelly is—a Rubik's Cube—and to grasp it you have to look at it from multiple viewpoints. Its various branches and side canyons total nearly a hundred goosenecked miles.