Twilight on the Upper Mesas is a thing not to be told in words and only dimly told on canvas. There is the primrose afterglow, so famous in the Alps. The purple mountains drape themselves in lavender veils. Winds scented with oil of sagebrush and aroma of pines come soughing through the juniper hills. The moon comes out sickle-shaped. You see a shooting star drop. Then a dim white group of moving forms emerges from the pines of the mountains—wild horses with leader scenting the air for foe, coming out for the night run to the drinking pools. Or your horses give a little sidewise jump from the trail, and you see a coyote loping along abreast not a gun-shot away. This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land, a jumping-off place for all the earth—too high for irrigation farming, too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties, where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild bands and are lost; and two out of every three are abandoned homesteads. The Dunn brothers have cut a road in eighteen miles to the Arroyo Hondo, where their house is, halfway to Taos; and they have also run a telephone line in.
Except for the telephone wires and the rough trail, you might be in an utterly uninhabited land on top of the world. The trail rises and falls amid endless scented juniper groves. The pale moon deepens through a pink and saffron twilight. The stillness becomes almost palpable—then, suddenly, you jump right off the edge of the earth. The flat mesa has come to an edge. You look down, sheer down, 1,000 feet straight as a plummet—two cañons narrow as a stone's toss have gashed deep trenches through the living rocks and with a whir of swift waters come together at the famous place known as the Bridge. You have come on your old friend the Rio Grande again, narrow and deep and blue from the mountain snows, an altogether different stream from the muddy Rio of the lower levels. Here it is joined by the Arroyo Hondo, another cañon slashed through the rocks in a deep trench—both rivers silver in the moonlight, with a rush of rapids coming up the great height like wind in trees, or the waves of the sea.
What a host of old frontier worthies must have pulled themselves up with a jerk of amaze and dumb wonder, when they first came to this sheer jump off the earth! First the mailed warriors under Coronado; then the cowled Franciscans; then Fremont and Kit Carson and Beaubien and Governor Bent and Manuel Lisa, the fur trader, and a host of other knights of modern adventure.
I suppose a proper picture of the Bridge, or Arroyo Hondo, cannot be taken; for a good one never has been taken, though travelers and artists have been coming this way for a hundred years. The two cañons are so close together and so walled that it is impossible to get both in one picture except from an airship. It is as if the earth were suddenly rent, and you looked down on that underworld of which Indian legend tells so many wonder yarns. Don't mind wondering how you will go down! The bronchos will manage that, where an Eastern horse would break his neck and yours, too. The driver jams on brakes; and you drop down a terribly steep grade in a series of switchbacks, or zigzags, to the Bridge. It is the most spectacularly steep road I know in America. It could not be any steeper and not drop straight; and there isn't anything between you and the drop but your horses' good sense. It is one of the places where you don't want to hit your horse; for if he jumps, the wagon will not keep to the trail. It will go over taking you and the horse, too.
But, before you know it, you have switched round the last turn and are rattling across the Bridge. Some Mexican teamsters are in camp below the rock wall of the river. The reflection of the figures and firelight and precipices in the deep waters calls up all sorts of tales of Arabian Nights and road robbers and old lawless days. Then, you pull up sharp at the toll house for supper, as quaint an inn as anything in Switzerland or the Himalayas. The back of the house is the rock wall of the cañon. The front is adobe. The halls are long and low and narrow, with low-roofed rooms off the front side only. From the Bridge you can go on to Taos by motor in moonlight; but the whole way by stage and motor in one day makes a hard trip, and there is as much of interest at the Bridge as at Taos. You don't expect to find settlers in this dim silver underworld, do you? Well, drive a few miles up the Arroyo Hondo, where the stream widens out into garden patch farms, and you will find as odd specimens of isolated humans as exist anywhere in the world—relics of the religious fanaticism of the secret lodges, of the Middle Ages—Penitentes, or Flagellantes, or Crucifixion people, who yearly at Lent re-enact all the sorrows of the Procession to the Cross, and until very recent years even re-enacted the Crucifixion.
After supper we strolled out down the cañon. It is impossible to exaggerate its beauty. Each gash is only the width of the river with sides straight as walls. The walls are yellow and black basalt, all spotted with red where the burning bush has been touched by the frosts. The rivers are clear, cold blue, because they are but a little way from the springs in the snows. Snows and clear water and frost in the Desert? Yes: that is as the Desert is in reality, not in geography books. Below the Bridge, you can follow the Rio Grande down to some famous hot springs; and in this section, the air is literally spicy with the oil of sagebrush. At daybreak, you see the water ousels singing above the rapids, and you may catch the lilt of a mocking-bird, or see a bluebird examining some frost-touched berries. It is October; but the goldfinches, which have long since left us in the North, are in myriads here.
The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The houses of the Arroyo Hondo are very small and very poor; for the Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light—La Luz—and the Brothers of the Darkness—Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where Penitentes have whipped themselves senseless with cactus belts, or dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring—1912—a woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby was bound. We passed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907.
The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? "To appease divine wrath," they say; but they might ask us—why have we dipsomaniacs and kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because "Julia O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their skins." Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow cañon shut off from the rest of the world.
They were not dolorous emotions that found vent as we drove back down Arroyo Hondo to the Bridge. Our driver got out a mouth organ. Then he played and sang snatches of dance tunes of the old, old days in the True West.