Part 6 (2/2)
But what matters the quarrel? Is not the whole region an Enchanted Mesa, one of the weirdest bits of the New World? You have barely rounded the Enchanted Mesa, when another oblong colossus looms to the fore, sheer precipice, but accessible by tiers of sand and stone at the far end; that is, accessible by handhold and foothold. Look again! Along the top of the walled precipice, a crest to the towering slab, is a human wall, the walls of an adobe streetful of houses, little windows looking out flush with the precipice line like the portholes of a s.h.i.+p. Then you see something red flutter and move at the very edge of the rock top--Hopi urchins, who have spied us like young eagles in their eyrie, and shout and wave down at us, though we can barely hear their voices. It looks for all the world like the top story of a castle above a moat.
At the foot of the sand-hill, I ask Hill Ki, why, now that there is no danger from Spaniard and Navajo, the Hopi continue to live so high up where they must carry all their supplies sheer, vertical hundreds of feet, at least 1,500 if you count all the wiggling in and out and around the stone steps and stone ladders, and niched handholds. Hill Ki grins as he unhitches his horses, and answers: ”You understan' when you go up an' see!” But he does not offer to escort me up.
As I am looking round for the beginning of a visible trail up, a little Hopi girl comes out from the sheep kraal at the foot of the Acoma Mesa.
Though she cannot speak one word of English and I cannot speak one word of Hopi we keep up a most voluble conversation by gesture. Don't ask how we did it! It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. She is dressed in white, home-woven skirt with a white rag for a head shawl--badge of the good girl; and her stockings come only to the ankles, leaving the feet bare. The feet of all the Hopi are abnormally small, almost monkey-shaped; and when you think of it, it is purely cause and effect. The foot is not flat and broad, because it is constantly clutching foothold up and down these rocks. I saw all the Hopi women look at my broad-soled, box-toed outing boots in amazement.
At hard spots in the climb, they would turn and point to my boots and offer me help till I showed them that the sole, though thick, was pliable as a moccasin.
The little girl signaled; did I want to go up?
I nodded.
She signaled; would I go up the hard, steep, quick way; or the long, easy path by the sand? As the stone steps seemed to give handhold well as foothold, and the sand promised to roll you back fast as you climbed up, I signaled the hard way; and off we set. I asked her how old she was; and she seemed puzzled how to answer by signs till she thought of her fingers--then up went eight with a tap to her chest signifying self.
I asked her what had caused such sore inflammation in her eyes. She thought a minute; then pointed to the sand, and winnowed one hand as of wind--the sand storm; and so we kept an active conversation up for three hours without a word being spoken; but by this, a little hand sought mine in various affectionate squeezes, and a pair of very sore eyes looked up with confidence, and what was lacking in words, she made up in shy smiles. Poor little Hopi kiddie! Will your man ”be bad boy,” too, by and by? Will you acquire the best, or the worst, of the white civilization that is encroaching on your tenacious, conservative race?
After all, you are better off, little kiddie, a thousand fold, than if you were a street gamin in the vicious gutters of New York.
By this, what with wind, and sand, and the weight of a kodak and a purse, and the hard ascent, one of the two climbers has to pause for breath; and what do you think that eight-year-old bit of small humanity does? Turns to give me a helping hand. That is too much for gravity. I laugh and she laughs and after that, I think she would have given me both hands and both feet and her soul to boot. She offers to carry my kodak and films and purse; and for three hours, I let her. Can you imagine yourself letting a New York, or Paris, or London street gamin carry your purse for three hours? Yet the Laguna people had told me to look out for myself. I'd find the Acomas uncommonly sharp.
That climb is as easy to the Acomas as your home stairs to you; but it's a good deal more arduous to the outsider than a climb up the whole length of the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, or up the Metropolitan Tower in New York; but it is all easily possible. Where the sand merges to stone, are handhold niches as well as stone steps; and where the rock steps are too steep, are wooden ladders. At last, we swing under a great overhanging stone--splendid weapon if the Navajos had come this way in old days, and splendid place for slaughter of the Spanish soldiers, who scaled Acoma two centuries ago--up a tier of stone steps, and we are on top of the white limestone Mesa, in the town of Acoma, with its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd streets, and its 1st, 2nd, and 3rd story houses, the first roof reached by a movable ladder, the next two roofs by stone steps.
I shall not attempt to describe the view from above. Take Was.h.i.+ngton's Shaft; multiply by two, set it down in Sahara Desert, climb to the top and look abroad! That is the view from Acoma. Is the trip worth while?
Is mountain climbing worth while? Do you suppose half a hundred people would yearly break their necks in Switzerland if climbing were not worth while? As Hill Ki said when I asked him why they did not move their city down now that all danger of raid had pa.s.sed, ”You go up an' see!” Now I understood. The water pools were but glints of silver on the yellow sands. The flocks of sheep and goats looked like ants. The rampart rocks that engirt the valley were yellow rims below; and across the tops of the far mesas could be seen scrub forests and snowy peaks. Have generations--generations on generations--of life amid such color had anything to do with the handicrafts of these people--pottery, basketry, weaving, becoming almost an art? Certainly, their work is the most artistic handicraft done by Indians in America to-day.
Boys and girls, babies and dogs, rush to salute us as we come up; but my little guide only takes tighter hold of my hand and ”shoos” them off. We pa.s.s a deep pool of waste water from the houses, lying in the rocks, and on across the square to the twin-towered church in front of which is a rudely fenced graveyard. The whole mesa is solid, hard rock; and to make this graveyard for their people, the women have carried up on their backs sand and soil enough to fill in a depression for a burying place.
The bones lie thick on the surface soil. The graveyard is now literally a bank of human limestone.
[Ill.u.s.tration: At the water hole on the outskirts of Laguna, one of the pueblos in New Mexico]
I have asked my little guide to take me to Marie Iteye, the only Acoma who speaks English; and I meet her now stepping smartly across the square, feet encased in boots at least four sizes smaller than mine, red skirt to knee, fine stockings, red shawl and a profusion of turquoise ornaments. We shake hands, and when I ask her where she learned to speak such good English, she tells me of her seven years' life at Carlisle. It is the one wish of her heart that she may some day go back: another shattered delusion that Indians hate white schools.
She takes me across to the far edge of the Mesa, where her sisters, the finest pottery makers of Acoma, are burning their fine gray jars above sheep manure. For fifty cents I can buy here a huge fern jar with finest gray-black decorations, which would cost me $5 to $10 down at the railroad or $15 in the East; but there is the question of taking it out in my camp kit; and I content myself with a little black-brown basin at the same price, which Marie has used in her own house as meal jar for ten years. As a memento to me, she writes her name in the bottom.
Her house we ascended by ladder to a first roof, where clucked a hen and chickens, and lay a litter of new puppies. From this roof goes up a tier of stone steps to a second roof. Off this roof is the door to a third story room; and a cleaner room I have never seen in a white woman's house. The fireplace is in one corner, the broom in the other, a window between looking out of the precipice wall over such a view as an eagle might scan. Baskets with corn and bowls of food and jars of drinking water stand in niches in the wall. The adobe floor is hard as cement, and clean. All walls and the ceiling are whitewashed. The place is spotless.
”Where do you sleep, Marie?” I ask.
”Downstairs! You come out and stay a week with me, mebbee, sometime.”
And as she speaks, come up the stone stairs from the room below, her father and brother, amazed to know why a woman should be traveling alone through Hopi and Moki and Navajo Land.
And all the other houses visited are clean as Marie's. Is the fact testimony to Carlisle, or the twin-towered church over there, or Marmon and Pratt? I cannot answer; but this I do know, that Acoma is as different from the other Hopi or Moki mesas as Fifth Avenue is from the Bowery.
All the time I was in the houses, my little guide had been waiting wistfully at the bottom of the ladder; and the children uttered shouts of glee to see me come down the ladder face out instead of backwards as the Acomas descend.
We descended from the Mesa by the sand-hills instead of the rock steps, preceded by an escort of romping children; but not a discourteous act took place during all my visit. Could I say the same of a three hours'
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