About 7 miles northward from Quaraí, nestling at the foot of Manzano Peak,[30] is an excellent example of the old-fashioned plaza village, called Manzano, which is Spanish for apple tree. The reason for the name is the presence there of a couple of ancient apple orchards, which are believed to date back to the time of the Franciscan Missions, and doubtless were set out by the Fathers of Quaraí, some 250 years ago. The village is of the typical adobe architecture of New Mexico, and though not so old as it looks, having been settled about 1825, it is very foreign of aspect. With its plaza, its old-fashioned flowers in the gardens, its houses massed one above another on the side of a hill that is topped by a great wooden cross, its murmurous acéquia, and its fine old Spanish torreon or tower of defense, Manzano holds features of picturesqueness enough to be worth a trip in itself. A unique feature of the place is the Manzano Lake which occupies a depression in the midst of the village—a charming sheet of water, beautiful and fragrant in season with water lilies. The source of the Lake is a magnificent spring hardby. To reach it, one climbs the hillside a quarter-mile or so, and then descends into a shaded hollow, where the cool water gushes up into a colossal bowl, and brimming over quickly sinks into the ground to re-appear below and form the village lake. The spring is locally known as El Ojo del Gigante—the Giant’s Eye—and is famed throughout the State as a very marvel among springs.
If one have time and inclination, the Estancia Valley, its lakes and ruins and Mexican villages may be made the objective of a trip by automobile from Santa Fe or Albuquerque. The roads in good weather are fair, as unimproved roads go, and in the mountain part pass through a wooded region of much loveliness—sunny park-like forests of pine and oak, with numerous rivulets and charming wild gardens. From Albuquerque to Mountainair by this route is about 75 miles.
CHAPTER V
OF ACOMA, CITY OF THE MARVELLOUS ROCK, AND LAGUNA
The oldest occupied town in the United States, and in point of situation perhaps the most poetic, is Acoma (ah´co-ma), occupying the flat summit of a huge rock mass whose perpendicular sides rise 350 feet out of a solitary New Mexican plain.[31] It is situated 15 miles southwest of the Santa Fe Railway station of Laguna, where modest accommodations are provided for travelers who stop over. The inhabitants of Acoma, numbering about 700, are Pueblo Indians, whose ancestors founded this rockborne town before the white history of the Southwest began. Coronado found it here in 1540. El Peñol Maravilloso—the Rock Marvellous—the old chroniclers called it. “A city the strangest and strongest,” says Padre Benavides, writing of it in 1630, “that there can be in the world.”
They will take you from Laguna to Acoma in an automobile over a road, little better than a trail, whose traversability depends more or less on weather conditions not only that day, but the day before.[32] It winds through a characteristic bit of central New Mexico landscape, breezy, sunlit and long-vistaed, treeless save for scattering piñon and juniper. Wild flowers bespangle the ground in season; and mountains—red, purple, amethystine, weather-worn into a hundred fantastic shapes—rise to view on every hand. In July and August the afternoon sky customarily becomes massed with cloud clusters, and local showers descend in long, wavering bands of darkness—here one, there another. Traveling yourself in sunshine beneath an island of clear turquoise in such a stormy sky, you may count at one time eight or ten of these picturesque streamers of rain on the horizon circle. Jagged lightnings play in one quarter of the heavens while broken rainbows illumine others. Nowhere else in our country is the sky so very much alive as in New Mexico and Arizona in summer. Nowhere else, I think, as in this land of fantastic rock forms, of deep blue skies, and of wide, golden, sunlit plains, do you feel so much like an enchanted traveler in a Maxfield Parrish picture.
Though the cliffs of Acoma are visible for several miles before you reach the Rock, you are almost at its base before you distinguish any sign of the village—the color of its terraced houses being much the same as that of the mesa upon which they are set. The soft rocky faces have been cut into grotesque shapes by the sand of the plain which the winds of ages have been picking up and hurling against them. There are strange helmeted columns, slender minarets and spires that some day perhaps a tempest will snap in two, dark, cool caverns which your fancy pictures as dens of those ogreish divinities you have read of Indians’ believing in.
Your first adventure at Acoma—and it is a joyous one—is climbing the Rock to the village on top. There are several trails. One is broad and easy, whereby the Pueblo flocks come up from the plains to be folded for the night, and men ahorseback travel. Shorter is the one your Indian guide will take you, by a gradual sandy ascent, to the base of the cliff. There you are face to face with a crevice up which you ascend by an all but perpendicular aboriginal stairway of stone blocks and boulders piled upward in the crack. Handholes cut in the rock wall support you over ticklish places, until finally you clamber out upon the flat summit. In Coronado’s time you would have been confronted there by a wall of loose stones which the Acomas had built to roll down on the heads of the unwelcome. Today, instead, the visitor is apt to be greeted by an official of the pueblo exacting a head-tax of a dollar for the privilege of seeing the town, and picture-taking extra!
I think this precipitous trail is the one known as El Camino del Padre (the Father’s Way), which is associated with a pretty bit of history. The first permanent Christian missionary at Acoma was the Franciscan Juan Ramirez. Now the Acomas had never been friendly to the Spaniards, and it was only after a three days’ hard battle in 1599, resulting in the capture and burning of the town by the Spaniards, that the Indians accepted vassalage to that inexplicable king beyond the sea.[33] Naturally, no friendly feeling was engendered by this episode; so when this Padre Ramirez, years afterward, was seen approaching the Rock one day—it was in 1629—quite alone and unarmed save with cross and breviary (having walked all the way from Santa Fe, a matter of 175 miles) the Acomas decided to make short work of him. The unsuspecting father started briskly up the rocky stairway, and when he came within easy range, the watching Indians shot their arrows at him. Then a remarkable thing happened. A little girl, one of a group looking over the edge of the precipice, lost her balance and fell out of sight apparently to her death. A few minutes later, the undaunted padre whom the shelter of the cliff had saved from the arrows, appeared at the head of the trail holding in his arms the little child smiling and quite unharmed. Unseen by the Indians, she had lit on a shelving bit of rock from which the priest had tenderly lifted her. So obvious a miracle completely changed the Indians’ feelings towards the long-gowned stranger, and he remained for many years, teaching his dusky wards Spanish and so much of Christian doctrine as they would assimilate. It was this Fray Juan Ramirez, it is said, who had built the animal trail which has been mentioned.
AN ACOMA INDIAN DANCE