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 Washington 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 Washington'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 passed, "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 pass 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.
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.