One of the stock excuses for Americans not seeing their own country is that the cost is so extortionate. Does this sound extortionate?
I drove out by livery because I was not sure how else to find the way. We left Santa Fe at six a. m., the clouds still tingeing the sand-hills. I have heard Eastern art critics say that artists of the Southwest laid on their colors too strongly contrasted, too glaring, too much brick red and yellow ocher and purple. I wish such critics had driven out with me that morning from Santa Fe. Gregoire Pedilla, the Mexican driver, grew quite concerned at my silence and ran off a string of good-natured nonsense to entertain me; and all the while, I wanted nothing but quiet to revel in the intoxication of shifting color. Twenty miles more or less, we rattled over the sand-hills before we began to climb in earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met only two Mexican teams on the way.
From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic tufa hub deep in ash dust, so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20. Here, White Rock Cañon lines both sides of the Rio Grande—precipices steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square block; and coming into this cañon at right angles are the cañons where lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers—some of them hundreds of feet above the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible cañons, you must drive up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.
We lunched in a little water cañon, which gashed the mesa side where a mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for this particular cañon being inaccessible to motors—a climb steep as a stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper mesa—acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open like a park but shaded by the stately yellow pine, and all of it above ordinary cloud-line, still girt by that snowy range of opal peaks beyond. We followed the trail at a rattling pace—the Archæological School had placed signs on the trees to Frijoles Cañon—and presently, by great mounds of building stone covered feet deep by the dust and débris of ages, became aware that we were on historic ground. Nor can the theory of drought explain the abandonment of this mesa. While it rains heavily only two months in the year—July and August—the mesa is so high that it is subject to sprinkling rains all months of the year; to be sure not enough for springs, but ample to provide forage and grow corn; and for water, these sky-top dwellers had access to the water cañons both before and behind. What hunting ground it must have been in those old days! Even yet you are likely to meet a flock of wild turkey face to face; or see a mountain lion slink away, or hear the bark of coyote and fox.
"Is this it, Gregoire?" I asked. The mound seemed irregularly to cover several acres—pretty extensive remains, I thought.
"Ah, no—no Señorita—wait," warned Gregoire expectantly.
I had not to wait long. The wagon road suddenly broke off short and plumb as if you tossed a biscuit over the edge of the Flatiron roof. I got out and looked down and then—went dumb! Afterwards, Mrs. Judge Abbott told me they thought I was afraid to come down. It wasn't that! The thing so far surpassed anything I had ever dreamed or seen; and the color—well—those artists accused of over-coloration could not have over-colored if they had tried. Pigments have not been invented that could do it!
Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara, three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red. And picture the face of the cliff under your feet, the sides of the massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives, pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched caves and winding recess and portholes—a city of the dead, silent as the dead, old almost as time!
The wind came soughing up the cañon with the sound of the sea. The note of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down among the tender green, lining the cañon stream, a mourning dove uttered her sad threnody—then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on the edge of the cañon wall and let the palpable past come touching me out of the silence.