Dotting the lonely landscape flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indian
boys with bows and arrows.
BURROS LADEN WITH FIRE-WOOD, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.
Across the plateau a few miles from the Enchanted Mesa stands another mesa, longer and lower than the other, reached from the ground by several paths. Here the survivors transferred their shattered lives, built a village like the old one, and in time became the ancestors of the present Acomans. While we drove toward it, listening to the story our guide told of that early tragedy in his exact Carlisle English, we nearly added three more ghosts to those already haunting the plain. Ahead of us the road had caved in over night, as roads have a way of doing in this country, leaving a yawning canyon thirty feet deep, toward which we sped at twenty miles an hour. Our brakes stopped us at the edge. I hastened to back, and make a side detour around the chasm, where in time our tracks would become the road, until some other freshet should eat into and undermine the porous ground. Roads in New Mexico are here today and gone tomorrow, cut off in their flower by a washout or a sandstorm, or simply collapsing because they weary of standing up. A miss is always as good as a mile, and our close escape was worth singling out from a dozen others only because of its dramatic reminder of what happened in the dim past from almost the same cause, on that magnificent rock. Both the Enchanted Mesa and the gaping hole behind us pointed out the uncertainty of life, which seemed so eternal in that brilliant spring sunshine.
Less dominating than the haunted mesa, New Acoma, which is, by the way, the oldest continuously inhabited town in the United States, reveals its towering proportions only at closer range. To view it best, it should be approached from the direction of Acomita. It stands 357 feet above the floor of the desert. Under its buttressed cliffs, a sheep corral and a few herder’s huts help to measure its great height. In the lee of the rock we left the car to the mercy of a group of slightly hostile women filling their waterjars at the scum-covered spring. The Acomans are not noted for pretty manners or lavish hospitality. Probably if a second bolt of lightning were to approach Acoma, a committee from the Governor would refuse it admittance unless it paid a fee of five dollars. It is said that since the San Diego Exposition, when the Acomans acquired an inflated idea of the cash value of their picturesqueness, tourist gold must accompany tourist glances at their persons, their pottery, their village, their children, and even the steep, hard trail up to their little stronghold.
We thought we had almost earned the freedom of the town by our toilsome climb, first over a young mountain of pure sea sand in which we sank ankle deep, and then hand over hand up a steep ledge of rock, where ancient grooves were worn for fingers and toes to cling to. Centuries of soft shod feet had hollowed these footholds, and centuries of women and men had carried food and water and building materials over this wearisome trail. Yet the Acoman may be right in demanding toll. He has gone to infinite trouble through generations of hard labor to perfect the little stronghold where he preserves his precious individuality. The giant beams in his old church, the mud bricks and stone slabs for his houses, the last dressed sheep and load of groceries, the very dirt that covers his dead were brought to the summit on the backs of his tribe. Acoma to the native is not an insignificant village of savages, but by treaty with the United States an independent nation; proud of its past, serenely confident of its future. It is almost as large as Monte Carlo, or the little republic of Andorra; with the assertive touchiness which so often goes with diminutive size, both in people and nations. Being a nation, why should it not have the same right to say who shall enter its gates, and under what conditions, as the United States; that parvenu republic surrounding it?
AT THE FOOT OF THE TRAIL, ACOMA.
(Enchanted Mesa in middle distance.)
Less dominating than the haunted Mesa, New Acoma reveals its towering proportions
only on nearer approach.