Knows the law of Night and Day,
What sea and land discoursing say
In sidereal years."
Emerson
New Mexico is the scene of surprises. Traditionally supposed to be a country that is as remote as possible from the accepted canons of polite society; that is also an arid waste whose temperature exceeds the limits of any well-regulated thermometer,—it reveals itself instead as a region whose temperature is most delightful, whose coloring of sky and atmosphere is often indescribably beautiful, and whose inhabitants include their fair proportion of those who represent the best culture and intelligence of our country. New Mexico has a mixed population. To a hundred and sixty thousand Americans there are a hundred and twenty-five thousand of Spanish or Mexican descent; a few hundred Chinese and Japanese, and some thirteen thousand Indians, who are, however, peaceful and industrious, and a proportion of whom have been educated in the Government schools for the Indians.
ACOMA, NEW MEXICO
The altitude of New Mexico seldom falls to less than five thousand feet, so that the air is cool and exhilarating. The rock formations partake of the same rich hue that characterizes those in Colorado and in Arizona, and as the soil is rich there is a continual play of color. The scenery is one changeful, picturesque panorama of mountains, rock, or walled cañons, vast mesas, uncanny buttes, and lava fields left by some vanished volcanic fires. The ancient Indian pueblos are still largely inhabited, and strange ruins of unknown civilizations add their atmosphere of mystery. The mouldering remains of the old Pecos church and the strange communistic dwellings in the old Pueblo de Taos; the ruins of the fortress and the seven circular mounds, which were the council-chambers and halls for mystic rites of the prehistoric civilization; and the fabled site of the ancient Aztec city where tradition says Montezuma was born,—all contribute to a unique interest in this "land of the turquoise sky," as New Mexico is called.
Acoma, the ancient pueblo perched on a perpendicular precipice four hundred feet high, with its terraced dwellings of adobe, its gigantic church, its reservoir cut out of solid rock, and its inhabitants with their strange customs, is fairly accessible to the traveller from Albuquerque by a drive of some twenty miles. Mr. Lummis calls it "the most wonderful pueblo," and "the most remarkable city in the world," as compared, of course, with other pueblos and ruined cities. Acoma has a present population of some four hundred Indians, and its romantic beauty of location is unparalleled. There are scientists who incline to believe that the original Acoma was built on the top of the Mesa Encantada,—the "Enchanted Mesa,"—a sheer, precipitous rock seven hundred feet high which is now practically unscalable; although Mr. F. W. Hodge, of the Bureau of Ethnology, achieved this apparently impossible feat, and found what is, in his convictions, unmistakable evidence of human habitation, supporting the traditions regarding this colossal rock. Some mighty cataclasm of nature swept the approach away; but if ever there were human habitations on the "Enchanted Mesa," the period is lost in prehistoric ages.