To the south and southeast spectral peaks tower to the clouds. Northward the blue shadows of the Sante Fe fall upon the pine-clad foot-hills.
Along the lower slopes of the Manzano are the ruins of the ancient pueblos. Abo and Cuarac are mounds of fallen buildings and desert-blown sand. Solemn in their grandeur, they dominate the lonely landscape in a land of adobe shacks.
Thirty miles from Cuarac, to the southeast, lies Tabiri, the "Grand Quivira." Huddled on the projecting slopes of the rounded ridges, access to it is a weary, dreary march. The nearest water is forty miles away. Toiling through sand ankle-deep, the traveler plods across the edge of the plains, through troughlike valleys, and up the wooded slope of the Mesa de los Jumanos. A mile to the south a whale-back ridge springs from the valley, nosing northward.
No sound breaks the stillness of the day. From the higher ridges the eye falls upon the pallid ghost of the city. Blotches of juniper relieve the monotony of the brown, lifeless grass. Grays fade into leaden hues, to be absorbed in the ashy, indeterminate colors of the sun-soaked plains. No fitter setting for a superstition could be found. Once a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, the topography of ridge gave it an unusual shape. Ruins of three four-story terrace houses face one another across narrow alleys. Six circular cisterns yawn amid mounds of fallen walls. At the center of the southerly blocks towers a gray quadrangular wall, the last of a large building. At the western terminus of the village, where the slope falls away to the valley, is a gigantic ruin. Its walls are thirty feet high and six feet thick. The roof has fallen, and the topmost layers of the bluish-gray limestone are ragged and time-worn.
The building had a frontage of two hundred and two feet, and its greatest depth was one hundred thirty-one feet. Flat-faced prisms, firmly laid in adobe mortar, are placed at irregular intervals in the walls.
The northern part of the ruin is one great cross-shaped room, thirty-eight feet wide and one hundred and thirty-one feet long. A gate fifteen feet wide and eleven feet high opens to the eastward. A mighty timber forms an arch supporting fifteen feet of solid masonry.
South of this is a great chamber cut up into smaller rooms, with long halls, with walls twenty feet in height. In one of the rooms is a fireplace, and over the doorways are carved wood lintels. An entrance from the south is given through a spacious antechamber. The rafters, hauled fifteen miles, must have weighed a ton.
Here lies the Colchis of the modern Argonaut. At first the Mexican pried through the debris-choked rooms, or feebly tunneled under the walls. With the coming of the white races and the drill, holes have been sunk into the original bed-rock. To the simple stories of the natives, fable-bearers have added maps, dying confessions, and discovered ciphers.
This ruin, which has caused so many heart-breaks and disappointments, are but the fragments of an old mission founded by Francisco de Atevedo in 1628. Tabiri was to be the central mission of Abo and Cuarac. The absence of water leads the modern explorer to believe that when the town was deserted the spring was killed. The gentle fathers who built the church supervised the construction of a water-works. On a higher ride are three crudely made reservoirs, with ditches leading to the village. The Piros had no animals save a few sheep, and the water supply was needed only for domestic uses, as the precipitation furnished moisture for small crops of beans and corn.
All these towns were wiped out by the Apaches, the red plague of the desert. First they attacked the outlying forts of the Salines, once supposed to be well-watered, teeming with game, and fruitful. Tradition again takes the place of unrecorded history, and tells that the sweet waters were turned to salt, in punishment of the wife of one of the dwellers in the city, who proved faithless. In 1675 the last vestige of aboriginal life was wiped out. For a century the Apaches held undisputed control of the country; then the Mexican pioneer crept in. His children are now scattered over the border. The American ranchman and gold-seeker followed, twisting the stories of a Christian conquest into strange tales of the seekers of buried treasures.