The Indians ran round and round the rock, but everywhere they found the straight walls as we see them to-day. It was impossible to climb them; they could not get up to the friends they had left behind, nor could the unfortunate people come down to them.
For days they tried every means to reach the top, but they could not do so. They could see their friends peering over at them, but day by day the faces grew fewer and fewer, until at last all were gone.
Since then the mesa has been held sacred by the Acomas, and regarded by them as a city of the dead.
This legend has been so thoroughly believed that scientists have often discussed the possibility of scaling this rock for the sake of the wonderful remains that must be on the top. Finally Professor Libbey determined to make the attempt.
He took with him a life-saving apparatus, of the kind that is used on the sea-coast for sending a line out to a wrecked vessel. His plan was to throw the line over the rock, and then have himself hauled up in an arrangement of ropes, used by sailors for working over the side of ships, and called by them a boatswain's chair.
The life-saving apparatus was tried, and proved to be most successful. A rocket was sent up with the life-line attached, and on the second effort was shot clear over the rock.
The line thus thrown was a thin quarter-inch rope; to this a strong hawser was attached, and after infinite labor pulled across the mesa's top. The boatswain's chair was then attached, and with the aid of a pair of strong horses, who pulled away at one end of the rope, the professor was hauled to the top of the rock.
To his disappointment he found no traces whatever of former inhabitants, and no evidences that any human being had ever trodden the rock's surface before.
He found plenty of water standing in pools, which had evidently been left from recent rains, and plenty of grass and trees similar to those found on the summits of the other buttes in the neighborhood, but the legend of the Acomas was evidently a myth.
He went from end to end of the Mesa, but there was not the slightest sign of cave or dwelling, nor even a scrap of broken pottery to prove that the rock had once been inhabited. G.H. Rosenfeld.