Our cliff-dwellings like little bird holes along the face of solid rock in which cave men lived hundreds—maybe thousands of years ago, are marvelously interesting, but to the spoiled globe-trotter, looking for profuse evidences of bygone manners and customs and beauty, such as you find in Alexandria or Pompeii, there are none.
There is, however, we had been told, an Arizona cave-dwelling that has a mural decoration that can rival in interest the frescoes in Italy or the hieroglyphics of Egypt. It is merely the imprint of a cave baby’s hand pressed thousands of years ago against the wall when the adobe was soft. You can also see cave-dwellings of a pigmy people that lived in the Stone Age and wore feather ruching around their necks; enchanted pools that have no bottoms; a lava river with a surface so sharp, brittle, like splintered glass, that nothing living can cross it and not be footless, actually, in the end. You can also find, to this day they say, a religious sect of Penitents who, in Holy Week, practice every sort of flesh mortification, carry crosses, lie down on cactus needles, flay themselves with cat-o’-nine-tails, and they used, a few years ago, to crucify especially fervent members.
But why try to convince people that traveling in the byways of the Southwest is not a strenuous thing to do? Our hornet inquisitor told us, “What do you want better than a cave to sleep in? It’s as good as your European hotels any day!” We forgot to ask her how she got up the face of the cliffs to get into the caves—a feat far above any ability of Celia’s or mine. She also said she liked taking potluck with the Indians. I wonder does she like, as they do, the taste of prairie dogs, and they say, occasionally, mice and snakes?
Although she did her best to spoil it all for us, we took away an unforgettable picture of an enchanted land. Why, though, I wonder, did she want to speak of it or think of it as different from what it really is? Vast, rugged, splendidly desolate, big in size, big in thought, big in ideals, with a few threads of enchanting history like that of Santa Fé, or vividly colored romances of frontier life and Indian legends that vie with Kipling’s jungle books.
CHAPTER XXII
SOME INDIANS AND MR. X.
The best commentary on the road between Santa Fé and Albuquerque is that it took us less than three hours to make the sixty-six miles, whereas the seventy-three from Las Vegas to Santa Fé took us nearly six. The Bajada Hill, which for days Celia and I dreaded so much that we did not dare speak of it for fear of making E. M. nervous, was magnificently built. There is no difficulty in going down it, even in a very long car that has to back and fill at corners; there are low stone curbs at bad elbows, and the turns are all well banked so that you feel no tendency to plunge off. A medium length car with a good wheel cut-under would run down the dread Bajada as easily as through the driveways of a park! And the entire distance across Sandoval County, although a tract of desert desolation or bleak sand and hills and cactus, is an easy drive over a smooth road. In one place you go through a great cleft cut through an impeding ridge, but most of the way you can imagine yourself in a land of the earth’s beginning and where white man never was. Two Indian shepherds in fact were the only human beings we saw until our road ran into the surprisingly modern city of Albuquerque.
Stopping at the various Harvey hotels of the Santa Fé system, yet not being travelers on the railroad, is very like being behind the scenes at a theater. The hotel people, curio-sellers, and Indians are the actors, the travelers on the incoming trains are the audience. Other people don’t count.
The Indian Pueblo of Taos