Part 5 (2/2)

It was Gregoire who called me to myself.

”We cannot take the wagon down there,” he said. ”No wagon has ever gone down here. You walk down slow and I come with the horses, one by one.”

It sounded a good deal easier than it looked. I haven't seen a steeper stair; and if you imagine five ladders trucked up zigzag against the Flatiron Building and the Flatiron Building three times higher than it is, you'll have an idea of the appearance of the situation; but it looked a great deal harder than it really was, and the trail has since been improved. The little steps cut in the volcanic _tufa_ or white pumice are soft and offer a grip to foothold. They grit to your footstep and do not slide like granite and basalt, though if New Mexico wants to make this wonderful Frijoles Canon accessible to the public, or if the Archaeological School can raise the means and cooperate with the Forestry Service trail makers, a broad graded wagon road should be cut down the face of this canon, graded gradually enough for a motor. The day that is done, visitors will number not 150 a year but 150,000; for nothing more exquisitely beautiful and wonderful exists in America.

It seems almost incredible that Judge and Mrs. Abbott have brought down this narrow, steep tier of 600 steps all the building material, all the furniture, and all the farm implements for their charming ranch place; but there the materials are and there is no other trail in but one still less accessible.

That afternoon, Mrs. Abbott and I wandered up the valley two or three miles and visited the high arched ceremonial cave hundreds of feet up the face of the precipice. The cave was first discovered by Judge and Mrs. Abbott on one of their Sunday afternoon walks. The Archaeological School under Dr. Hewitt cleared out the debris and acc.u.mulated erosion of centuries and put the ceremonial chamber in its original condition.

”Restoring the ruins” does not mean ”manufacturing ruins.” It means digging out the erosion that has washed and washed for thousands of years down the hillsides during the annual rains. All the caves have been originally plastered in a sort of terra cotta or ocher stucco.

When that is reached and the charred wooden beams of the smoked, arched ceilings, restoration stops. The aim is to put the caves as they were when the people abandoned them. On the floors is a sort of rock bottom of plaster or rude cement. When this is reached, digging stops. It is in the process of digging down to these floors that the beautiful specimens of prehistoric pottery have been rescued. Some of these specimens may be seen in Harvard and Yale and the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum in New York, and in the Santa Fe Palace, and the Field Museum of Chicago. Sometimes as many as four feet of erosion have overlaid the original flooring. When digging down to the flooring of the ceremonial cave, an _estufa_ or sacred secret underground council chamber was found; and this, too, was restored. The pueblo of roofless chambers seen from the hilltop on the floor of the valley was dug from a mound of debris. In fact, too great praise cannot be given Dr. Hewitt and his co-workers for their labors of restoration; and the fact that Dr. Hewitt was a local man has added to the effectiveness of the work, for he has been in a position to learn from New Mexican Indians of any discoveries and rumors of discoveries in any of the numerous caves up the Rio Grande. For instance, when about halfway down the trail that first day, at the Frijoles Canon or Rito de los Frijoles, as it is called, I met on an abrupt bend in the trail a Pueblo Indian from Santa Clara--blue jean suit, red handkerchief around neck, felt hat, huge silver earrings and teeth white as pearls--Juan Gonzales, one of the workers in the canon, who knows every foot of the Rio Grande. Standing against the white pumice background, it was for an instant as if one of the cave people had stepped from the past. Well, it was Wan, as we outsiders call him, who one day brought word to the Archaeological workers that he had found in the pumice dust in one of the caves the body of a woman. The cave was cleaned out or restored, and proved to be a back apartment or burial chamber behind other chambers, which had been worn away by the centuries' wash. The cerements of the body proved to be a woven cloth like burlap, and beaver skin. There you may see the body lying to-day, proving that these people understood the art of weaving long before the Flemings had learned the craft from Oriental trade.

You could stay in the Rito Canon for a year and find a cave of fresh interest each day. For instance, there is the one where the form of a huge plumed serpent has been etched like a molding round under the arched roof. The serpent, it was, that guarded the pools and the springs; and when one considers where snakes are oftenest found, it is not surprising that the serpent should have been taken as a totem emblem. Many of the chambers show six or seven holes in the floor--places to connect with the Great Earth Magician below. Little alcoves were carved in the arched walls for the urns of meal and water; and a sacred fireplace was regarded with somewhat the same veneration as ancient Orientals preserved their altar fires. In one cave, some old Spanish _padre_ has come and carved a huge cross, in rebuke to pagan symbols. Other large arched caves have housed the wandering flocks of goats and sheep in the days of the Spanish regime; and there are other caves where horse thieves and outlaws, who infested the West after the Civil War, hid secure from detection. In fact, if these caves could speak they ”would a tale unfold.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Looking down on the ruins of a prehistoric dwelling from one of the upper caves in the Rito de las Frijoles, New Mexico]

The aim of the Archaeological Society is year by year to restore portions till the whole Rito is restored; but at the present rate of financial aid, complete restoration can hardly take place inside a century. When you consider that the Rito is only one of many prehistoric areas of New Mexico, of Utah, of Colorado, awaiting restoration, you are constrained to wish that some philanthropist would place a million or two at the disposal of the Archaeological Society. If this were done, no place on earth could rival the Rito; for the funds would make possible not only the restoration of the thousands of mounds buried under tons of debris, but it would make the Canon accessible to the general public by easier, nearer roads. The inaccessibility of the Rito may be in harmony with its ancient character; but that same inaccessibility drives thousands of tourists to Egypt instead of the Jemez Forests.

There are other things to do in the Canon besides explore the City of the Dead. Wander down the bed of the stream. You are pa.s.sing through parks of stately yellow pine, and flowers which no botanist has yet cla.s.sified. There is the globe cactus high up on the black basalt rocks, blood-red and fiery as if dyed in the very essence of the sun.

There is the mountain pink, compared to which our garden and greenhouse beauties are pale as white woman compared to a Hopi. There is the short-stemmed English field daisy, white above, rosy red below, of which Tennyson sings in ”Maud.” Presently, you notice the stream banks crus.h.i.+ng together, the waters tumbling, the pumice changing to granite and basalt; and you are looking over a fall sheer as a plummet, fine as mist.

Follow farther down! The canon is no longer a valley. It is a corridor between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain, and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and darker grew the pa.s.sageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down--down--down--tumbled the waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge to another in spray, then down--down--down to the Rio Grande, many feet below. You come back from the brink with a little s.h.i.+ver, but it was a s.h.i.+ver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the great archaeologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the simple words--”The Rito is a beautiful place.”

CHAPTER V

THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA

They call it ”the Enchanted Mesa,” this island of ocher rock set in a sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart business tricks of modern Yankeedom.

Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish, present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn.

Back at Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish dons are followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700, sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa--called Enchanted--or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is--pagan hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.

Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and necklaces and turquoise-set b.u.t.tons down trouser leg, scouring below these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts and crafts of the Hopi people--silver work, weaving, basketry--into the Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether the raid took place a minute before midday, or a second after nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find.

There you can see their cities and towns to this day.

And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and Laguna and Acoma and Zuni and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will, which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some of these ruins--in the Manzanos and in western Arizona--would house a modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they: council halls, temples, what? And what reduced the nation that once peopled them to a remnant of nine or ten thousand Hopi all told? Do you not see how the past of this whole Enchanted Mesa, this Painted Desert, this Dream Land, is more romantic than fiction could create, or than picayune historic disputes as to dates and broken crockery?

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Hopi wooing, which has an added interest in that among the Hopi Indians, women are the rulers of the household]

There are prehistoric cliff dwellings in this region of as great marvel as up north of Santa Fe; north of Ganado at Chin Lee, for instance. But if you wish to see the modern descendants of these prehistoric Cliff Dwellers, you can see them along the line of the National Forests from the Manzanos east of Albuquerque to the Coconino and Kaibab at Grand Canon in Arizona. Let me explain here also that the Hopi are variously known as Moki, Zuni, Pueblos; but that Hopi, meaning peaceful and life-giving, is their generic name; and as such, I shall refer to them, though the western part of their reserve is known as Moki Land. You can visit a pueblo at Isleta, a short run by railroad from Albuquerque; but Isleta has been so frequently ”toured” by sightseers, I preferred to go to the less frequented pueblos at Laguna and Acoma, just south of the western Manzano National Forests, and on up to the three mesas of the Moki Reserve in Arizona. Also, when you drive across Moki Land, you can cross the Navajo Reserve, and so kill two birds with one stone.

Up to the present, the inconvenience of reaching Acoma will effectually prevent it ever being ”toured.” When you have to take a local train that lands you in an Indian town where there is no hotel at two o'clock in the morning, or else take a freight, which you reach by driving a mile out of town, fording an irrigation ditch and crawling under a barb wire fence--there is no immediate danger of the objective point being rushed by tourist traffic. This is a mistake both for the tourist and for the traffic. If anything as unique and wonderful as Acoma existed in Egypt or j.a.pan, it would be featured and visited by thousands of Americans yearly. As it is, I venture to say, not a hundred travelers see Acoma's Enchanted Mesa in a year, and half the number going out fail to see it properly owing to inexperience in Western ways of meeting and managing Indians. For instance, the day before I went out, a traveler all the way from Germany had dropped off the transcontinental and taken a local freight for the Hopi towns. When a tourist wants to see things in Germany, he finds a hundred willing palms out to collect and point the way; but when a tourist leaves the beaten trail in America, if he asks too many questions, he is promptly told to ”go to--” I'll not say where.

That German wasn't in a good mood when he dropped off the freight train at Laguna. Good rooms you can always get at the Marmons, but there is no regular meal place except the section house. If you are a good Westerner, you will carry your own luncheon, or take cheerful pot luck as it comes; but the German wasn't a good Westerner; and it didn't improve his temper to have b.u.t.ter served up mixed with flies to the tune of the landlady's complaint that ”it didn't pay nohow to take tourists”

and she ”didn't see what she did it for anyway.”

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