For miles and miles after leaving Isleta, a quite large settlement where there are many Indians and also many tourists, you go on and on and on over an easy gradually ascending road not unlike the long Platte Valley drive, but much more uninhabited. The once dangerous fording of the Puerco River is no longer a barrier to motorists, as there is a splendid new bridge that takes you smoothly over. From time to time you come to a few adobe huts or a lonely little packing-box railroad station, but your road stretches uneventfully on, until Laguna.
There is no need of going by motor to get a glimpse of Laguna, for you have only to sit on the observation platform—or even look out of a window of any train in the Santa Fé Railroad. The pueblo of Laguna at a glance, is a collection of baked earth blocks piled steeply one behind the other against a sun-baked yellow hill at the side of the railroad track.
But to reach the Enchanted Mesa, and the sky-built city of Acoma, you must drive southward from Laguna across a stubbled prairie into a desert valley rimmed with distant cliffs like the walls of a vast garden. As you round a sand dune you come suddenly upon a gigantic round, flat-topped rock, like a titanic pink tree-stump—scarcely a reward for all those miles and miles of dreariness and intense heat, even though its flat-chopped top is a thousand feet clear above the surrounding plain. But when you visualize the story of that terrible storm that washed the great rock ladder away and left a village of women and children marooned upon that dizzy height until they starved or plunged off to a quicker death, it certainly grips you in its appalling awe.
It is a little wonder that the Indians think it haunted and accursed! For my part it seems miracle enough that anyone ever got up there at all even with a leaning rock supplemented with a notched tree ladder. Scaling such a cliff would be a feat of horror beside which circus thrillers, looping gaps and dipping deaths would be a comparatively tame performance.
A little way beyond the Enchanted Mesa crowned upon ramparts of fantastic perpendicular crags arises Acoma, the skyland citadel of enchantment. You know you can’t be in such prosy place as Here, or within a thousand years of Now. You are standing before the shadowy citadel of some ancient Assyrian king, or more likely yet, you have journeyed into the land of fairy-tales and have come to the castle of the King of the Iron Mountain. Way, way above you, you see tiny figures of the sky inhabitants inquisitively peering down. Several Indians come down from their soaring citadel and look you over. Finally one of them, very solemn and serious, with his shirt-tail hanging out, motions, “Do you want to go up?”
You do, but how? There are only two paths, one hard and short, the other long and easy! The easy one is as close to mountain climbing as the ordinary person would want to undertake, though Indian mules and burros make it without difficulty. A burro, and a mule, and a mountain goat must spring from the same species. You clamber, therefore, up the easy road—a stiff, winding defile like the rock-hewn causeway to Valhalla in a Metropolitan production of a Wagner opera, the trail narrowing as it ascends until finally it is nothing but a narrow shelf at a precipice edge. If you are rather light-headed and none too sure-footed you clutch tightly to a stronger, steadier hand and turn your face cliffward as you shakily venture the last of the ascent.
But your reward on top is a prehistoric Aztec citadel of communal houses and occupied by people living today exactly as their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. An Indian communal house is really a honeycomb of adobe boxes like a flight of gigantic steps; the row on top set back from the one below so that the roof of the first floor makes the terrace in front of the second, and the roof of the second a piazza in front of the third. Against the wall of each story lean the typical ladders by which the Hopi Indian always enters his home. The ground-floor rooms are usually entered through a hatchway in the ceiling from a room or a terrace above.
Acoma is really the sister of Santa Fé, who has never changed her Indian ways. When the noble Spanish invader tried to make a conquest of the whole family, Acoma met him at the top of her cliff-hewn staircase with a battle-ax! I should think after that climb—the so-called “easy” way had not been built then—one of her brown babies could have pushed him off with a small fore-finger!
To know anything at all about the lives or natures or customs of these people, you would have to see more than is possible to an average, ignorant tourist, who looks helplessly at their inscrutably serious faces. Even if by fortunate chance one of them invites you to mount a ladder and look into a dwelling or two, all you see is a small adobe room with bare walls, a bare floor and possibly a small high window. There is a fireplace in one corner and maybe a string stretched across another with some clothes or blankets hung over it, or piled against a wall on the floor, a water jar or two, and some primitive cooking utensils. Except a few younger members of the community who have been to Carlisle, no one speaks a word of English. Although in a few places such as the Grand Canyon or Albuquerque an Indian will let you take his picture for twenty-five cents, Mr. X. at Albuquerque had warned us not to photograph any Indians we might meet elsewhere. In such places as Acoma it might even be dangerous. Believing, as they do, that a photograph takes a portion of their life away from them, no wonder they object to a stranger’s helping himself to a little piece of their existence.