Part 6 (1/2)
They tell you outside that it is a hard drive, all the way from twenty-five to thirty miles to Acoma. Don't you believe it! For once, Western miles are too short. The drive is barely eighteen miles and as easy as on a paved city street; but the German had left most of his temper at Laguna. When he reached the foot of the steep acclivity leading up to the town of Acoma on the very cloud-crest of a rampart rock and found no guide, he started up without one and, of course, missed the way. How he ever reached the top without breaking his neck is a wonder. The Indians showed me the way he had come and said they could not have done it themselves. Anyway, what temper he had not left at Laguna he scattered sulphurously on the rocks before he reached the crest of Acoma; and when he had climbed the perilous way, he was too fatigued to go on through the town. The whole episode is typically characteristic of our stupid short-sightedness as a continent to our own advantage. A $20 miner's tent at Laguna for meals, another at Acoma, a good woman in charge at the Laguna end to put up the lunches, a $10 a month Indian boy to show tourists the way up the cliff--and thousands of travelers would go in and come out with satisfaction. Yet here is Acoma, literally the Enchanted, unlike anything else in the whole wide world; and it is shut off from the sightseer because enterprise is lacking to put in $100 worth of equipment and set the thing going. Is it any wonder people say that Europeans live on the opportunities Americans throw away? If Acoma were in Germany, they would be diverting the Rhine round that way so you could see it by moonlight.
Being a Westerner, it didn't inconvenience me _very_ seriously to rise at four, and take a cab at five, and drive out from Albuquerque a mile to the freight yards, where it was necessary to wet one's feet in an _acequia_ ditch and crawl under a barb wire fence to reach the caboose.
The desert sunrise atoned for all--air pure wine, the red-winged blackbirds, thousands of them, whistling sheer joy of life along the overflow swamps of the irrigation ca.n.a.ls. The train pa.s.ses close enough to the pueblo of Isleta for you to toss a stone into the back yards of the little adobe dwellings; but Isleta at best is now a white-man edition of Hopi type. Few of the houses run up tier on tier as in the true pueblo; and the gorgeous skirts and s.h.i.+rts seen on the figures moving round the doors are nothing more nor less than store calico in diamond dyes. In the true Hopi pueblo, these garments would be sun-dyed brown skin on the younger children, and home-woven, vegetable-dyed fabric on the grown-ups. The true Hopi skirt is nothing more nor less than an oblong of home-woven cloth, preferably white, or vegetable blue, brought round to overlap in front under a belt, with, perhaps, shoulder straps like a man's braces. A shawl over nature's undergarments completes the native costume; and the little monkey-shaped bare feet cramped from long scrambling over the rocks get better grip on steep stone stairs than civilized boots, though many of the pueblo women are now affecting the latter.
The freight train climbs and climbs into the gypsum country of terrible drought, where nothing grows except under the ditch, and the cattle lie dead of thirst, and the wind blows a hurricane of dust that almost knocks you off your feet.
The railroad pa.s.ses almost through the lower streets of Laguna; so that when you look up, you see tier upon tier of streets and three-story houses up and up to the Spanish Church that crowns the hill. You get off at Laguna, but do not waste much time there; for the glories of Laguna are past. Long ago--in the fifties or thereabouts--the dam to the lagoon which gives the community its name broke, letting go a waste of flood waters; and since that time, the men of Laguna have had to go away for work, the women only remaining constantly at the village engaged herding their flocks and making pottery. Perhaps it should be stated here in utter contradiction to the Herbert Spencer school of sociology that among the Hopi the women not only rule but own the house and all that therein is. The man may claim the corn patch outside the town limits, where you see rags stuck on sticks marking each owner's bounds; or if he attends the flocks he may own them; but the woman is as supreme a ruler in the house as in the Navajo tribe, where the supreme deity is female. If the man loses affection for his spouse, he may gather up his saddle and bridle, and leave.
”I marry, yes,” said Marie Iteye, my Acoma guide, to me, ”and I have one girl--her,” pointing to a pretty child, ”but my man, I guess he--a bad boy--he leave me.”
If the wife tires of her lord, all she has to do is hang the saddle and bridle outside. My gentleman takes the hint and must be off.
I set this fact down because a whole school of modern s.e.x sociologists, taking their cue from Herbert Spencer, who never in his life knew an Indian first hand, write nonsensical deductions about the evolution of woman from slave status. Her position has been one of absolute equality among the Hopi from the earliest traditions of the race.
At Laguna, you can obtain rooms with Mr. Marmon, or Mr. Pratt; but you must bring your luncheon with you; or, as I said before, take chance luck outside at the section house. A word as to Mr. Marmon and Mr.
Pratt, two of the best known white men in the Indian communities of the Southwest. Where white men have foregathered with Indians, it has usually been for the higher race to come down to the level of the lower people. Not so with Marmon and Pratt! If you ask how it is that the pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are so superior to all other Hopi communities of the Southwest, the answer invariably is ”the influence of the two Marmons and Pratt.” Coming West as surveyors in the early seventies the two Marmons and Pratt opened a trading store, married Indian women and set themselves to civilize the whole pueblo. After almost four years' pow-wow and argument and coaxing, they in 1879 succeeded in getting three children, two boys and a girl, to go to school in the East at Carlisle. To-day, those three children are leading citizens of the Southwest. Later on, the trouble was not to induce children to go, but to handle the hundreds eager to be sent. To-day, there is a government school here, and the two pueblos of Laguna and Acoma are among the cleanest and most advanced of the Southwest. Fifteen hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you may see the transition from Indian to white in the subst.i.tution of downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through the roof.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Copyright by H. S. Poley_
A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave]
Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant--Marie Iteye--speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching and civilizing influence of ”Marmon and Pratt.” The streets--1st, 2nd and 3rd, they call them--of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the porthole of a s.h.i.+p looking out over the precipice across the rolling, purpling, s.h.i.+mmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of was.h.i.+ng water on the floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians curiously discouraged about results.
”It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results,” one teacher bewailed. ”We doubt if it ever does much good.”
”Doubt if it ever does much good?” I should like to take that teacher and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has barely begun--well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer. At Acoma, you feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid and degenerate.
Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma; and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a motor if you have one.
Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a ma.s.s of gorgeous, voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf, miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's ”Maud” trod--gorgeous desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.
Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jose River, jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been, or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.
Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split by the s.h.i.+mmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors, transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus s.h.i.+nes with the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild poppies s.h.i.+ne on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars, they draw their life from the sun. And the blue forget-me-nots are like bits of heaven, because their faces s.h.i.+ne with the light of an unclouded sky from dawn to dark.
You see the countless herds of sheep and goats and cattle and horses belonging to the Indian pueblos, herded, perhaps, by a little girl on horseback, or a couple of boys lying among the sage brush; but the figures come to your eye unreal and out of all perspective, the horses and cattle, exaggerated by heat mirage, long and leggy like camels in Egypt, the boys and girls lifted by the refraction of light clear off earth altogether, unreal ghost figures, the bleating lambs and kids enveloped in a purple, hazy heat veil--an unreal Dream World, an Enchanted Mesa all of it, a Painted Desert made of lavender mist and lilac light and heat haze s.h.i.+mmering and unreal as a poet's vision.
It adds to the glamour of the unreal as the sun mounts higher, and the planed rampart mountain walls encircling the mesa begin to s.h.i.+mmer and s.h.i.+ft and lift from earth in mirage altogether.
You hear the bleat-bleat of the lambs, and come full in the midst of herds of thousands going down to a water pool. These Indians are not poor; not poor by any means. Their pottery and baskets bring them ready money. Their sheep give them meat and wool; and the little corn patches suffice for meal.
Then the blank wall of the purple mountains opens; and you pa.s.s into a large saucer-shaped valley engirt as before by the troweled yellow _tufa_ walls; a lake of light, where the flocks lift in mirage, lanky and unreal. Almost the spell and lure of a Sahara are upon you, when you lift your eyes, and there--straight ahead--lies an enchanted island in this lake of light, s.h.i.+mmering and lifting in mirage; sides vertical yellow walls without so much as a handhold visible. High as three Niagaras, twice as high it might be, you so completely lose sense of perspective; with top flat as a billiard table, detached from rock or sand or foothill, isolated as a slab of towering granite in a purple sea. It is the Enchanted Mesa.
Hill Ki, my Indian driver, grunts and points at it with his whip. ”The Enchanted Mesa,” he says.
I stop to photograph it; but who can photograph pure light? Only one man has ever existed who could paint pure light; and Turner is dead. Did a race once live on this high, flat, isolated, inaccessible slab of huge rock? Lummis says ”yes;” Hodge says ”no.” Are there pottery remnants of a dead city? Lummis says ”yes;” Hodge says ”no.” Both men climbed the rock, though Hill Ki tells me confidentially they ”were very scare,”
when it came to throwing a rope up over the end of the rock, to pull the climber up as if by pulley. Marmon and Pratt have both been up; and Hill Ki tells me so have two venturesome white women climbers, whose names he does not know, but ”they weren't scare.” As we pa.s.s from the end to the side of the Enchanted Mesa, it is seen to be an oblong slab utterly cut off from all contact but so indented halfway up at one end as to be ascended by a good climber to within distance of throwing a rope over the top. The quarrel between Lummis and Hodge has waxed hotter and hotter as to the Enchanted Mesa without any finale to the dispute; and far be it from an outsider like myself to umpire warfare amid the G.o.ds of the antiquarian; but isn't it possible that a custom among the Acoma Indians may explain the whole matter; and that both men may be partly right? Miss McLain, who was in the Indian Service at Laguna, reports that once an Indian family told her of this Acoma ceremony. Before a youth reaches manhood, while he is still being instructed in the mysteries of Hopi faith in the underground council room or _kiva_, it is customary for the Acomas to blindfold him and send him to the top of the Enchanted Mesa for a night's lonely vigil with a jar of water as oblation to the spirits. These jars explain the presence of pottery, which Lummis describes. They would also give credence to at least periodic inhabiting of the Mesa. The absence of house ruins, on the other hand, would explain why Hodge scouted Lummis' theory. The Indians explained to Miss McLain that a boy could climb blindfolded where he could not go open-eyed, a fact that all mountain engineers will substantiate.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A shy little Indian maid in a Hopi village of Arizona]