With two friends, we had planned an excursion to Chimayo, where in the Mexican half of the town are made soft, hand-woven rugs, famous the world over. On the way, we stopped at Pojoaque, for the purpose of seeing the old road-house made famous by old M. Boquet of fragrant memory, when Santa Fé was an army post, and officers rode out to lively supper parties here. A tangled orchard and flower garden, a well renowned for its pure water, and the quaint little Spanish widow of M. Boquet are all that is left of what was once a ship-shape inn where people loved to stop. The rest is cobwebs and rubbish. But any spot where gaiety has been enhanced by good food is always haunted by memories of former charm.
At the sleepy Indian pueblo of Nambé, now fast diminishing, we forded a trickle of a stream, hardly wide enough to notice, which sported down from the hills. Then out into a sandy waste, surrounded by red buttes, we drove. And then we drove no further. On a hilltop the car gently ceased to move, even as it had done outside of Chandler. For a hot hour we examined and experimented, till we finally fastened the guilt on the ignition. We were ten miles from everywhere, and which were the shorter ten miles we were not exactly sure. Like the hypothetical donkey, starving between two bales of hay, we wasted time debating in which direction to go for help. An Indian riding by on a scalded looking pony we interrogated, but like all of his race, the more he was questioned the less he contributed. Much against his will, we rented his pony, and while the man of our party rode bareback to Pojoaque and the nearest telephone, we coaxed the pony’s owner from his sulks with sandwiches. Would that we had saved them for ourselves!
Two hours later, Bill rattled up, in a car shabby as a shoemaker’s child’s shoes, and as disreputable as the proverbial minister’s son. Remembering our premature farewell, he grinned, lifted the hood of the car, nosed about for a moment, called sharply to his ten-year-old assistant for tools, and in two minutes the engine was running. Smiling just as cheerfully as if his farewell appearance had not cost us twenty dollars, Bill started his car, and wished us good luck.
“I wish we could take you with us, Bill,” I said.
“I sure wish I could go,” said Bill.
“Well, good-by, Bill.”
“Good-by, and over the top,” said Bill, driving off.
“I hate to say good-by to Bill,” said Toby and I, to each other.
Thus delayed, it was twilight when we reached the old Sanctuario, famous as the Lourdes of America. Inside, its whitewashed walls displayed crutches and other implements of illness, as witness to the cures effected by the shrine. The interior as of most Mexican churches, was filled with faded paper flowers and tawdry gilt pictures of saints. Outside, twin towers and a graceful balcony, and a walled churchyard shaded by giant cottonwoods gave the church a distinction apart from all its miracles. At a brook nearby, a majestic, black-shawled Mexican madonna filled her olla, mildly cursing us that the fee we gave for opening the gate was no larger, lest we should realize it had been too large.
Across the plaza stood a fine example of a built-up kiva or estufa, and nearby we dared a glance, in passing, at a morado. But we had come to see and perhaps buy rugs,—those woolly, soft blankets at which the heart of the collector leaps. During the day, however, the Santa Cruz, which divides Mexican from Indian Chimayo, had risen from the melting of snows in the mountains, and we could only feast our eyes on the lovely hill-lined valley, with its greens and mauves, its cobalt hills and blossoming apricots. There was positively no way to cross. I remembered that Bill said he too had been delayed at Pojoaque by swollen streams. But the idea of hurrying home did not occur to us, as it might have to a native. We communicated our interest in rugs to little Indian boys and handsome swart Mexicans, who stripped the floors and beds of their great-grandparents, learning that we sought antiques. We soon had a choice of the greasiest and most tattered rugs the town afforded, but nothing worth purchasing. We were on the wrong side of the river, and out of luck. Relinquishing the idea of seeing rug-weaving in process, we at last turned homeward, with a new moon menacing us over our left shoulder.