In this wise, witty and highly original book, Mr. and Mrs. Priestley record their impressions and opinions after a recent visit to the American Southwest. In the course of their separate excursions, Jacquetta Hawkes took the high road to Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico to explore the ancient culture of the Pueblo, Navaho and Zuni Indians, their arts and crafts and their immemorial rites. J.B. Priestley took the low road to Dallas and Ft. Worth to investigate the glaringly new cities, the material prosperity and the neon-lighted, mass-produced world which exist there--but as Mr. Priestley points out, are not confined to Texas or, for that matter, even to the United States. The differences between these two ways of life--the earliest and the latest on this continent--and the inferences to be drawn from their uneasy coexistence are strikingly presented in this delightful collaboration. In provocative contrast to the modern world which Mr. Priestley describes with wit and candid good humor, are the ancient Indian ceremonies, the desert landscapes, the communities of Santa Fe and Los Alamos of which Miss Hawkes writes vividly and significantly. The authors' purpose, which was to observe man--on the one hand in a primitive society such as still exists in New Mexico, and on the other in the booming technocracy of the mid-twentieth century--is well served by an archaeologist who is also a poet, and a novelist who is as well a student of man as a social animal. Journey Down a Rainbow, made up of the Priestley's spontaneous and frank exchange of ideas and impressions, will give Texans, and their fellow Americans alike, a fresh eye for the Southwest as a source of our prehistoric roots and as the prime example of the modern world in the making. The book is sure to disturb as well as entertain its readers.