THE ENCHANTED MESA, ACOMA, NEW MEXICO.
A shimmering tower of blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock.
Nevertheless the Acoman is not popular, even among Indians of other villages. Though neighboring towns, Laguna and Acoma always have swords drawn. The Acoman has a wide reputation for being surly and inhospitable, and I am willing to admit he does his best to live up to that reputation.
Many tourists have made the journey across the desert, and the climb to the mesa’s top, only to be turned back or admitted at exorbitant fees. Luck was with us. We arrived on a day when the governor and all the men of the village were at work in the fields of Acomita, and only the women and children, as on the fateful day when the Enchanted Mesa was struck, remained in the village. Our guide, being from Laguna, spoke the dialect of the Acomans, and proved a doughty aid. Hardly had our heads shown above the rocky stairs when the gray landscape was suddenly peopled by women and children; the children clad in one gingham garment, or, if of tender age, in nothing save the proverbial string of beads, for even the smile was missing from their faces. Most of the women, short-skirted, with brilliant floating scarves on their heads, carried babies slung in knotted shawls. Their clamor at sight of Toby’s camera required no knowledge of Acomese to be recognized as vituperative. They seemed as anxious to be photographed as a burglar is to have his thumb-prints taken. They were in fact so uncomplimentary that we recalled uneasily the Spanish monk who visited the town to make converts, and was hustled down to the plain by the short trail. No tourist uses this trail if he can help himself. It leads off the walled edge of the graveyard into space for three hundred odd feet, and ends on the rocks below. With great presence of mind the monk made a parachute of his flowing skirts, and alighted unhurt on the desert. Wearing khaki breeches, we closed the camera regretfully.
An Indian’s prejudice against the camera arises logically from his theological belief that nature abhors a duplicate. With keenest powers of observation, he has noted that no two trees, no two leaves, no animals, even no blades of grass are exactly alike. Hence, when he makes a rug, a basket or an olla, he never duplicates it absolutely. Therefore he fears the camera’s facsimile of Nature. If he allows himself to be photographed, he believes that something of himself passes into the black box, and thereafter his soul is halved of its power. If he afterward falls sick, undergoes misfortune or dies, he attributes it to this sin against an inexorable law of Nature. It all sounds childishly crude, yet a much respected man named Plato held a somewhat similar belief.
The difference between Plato and the Pueblo Indians lies less in their theology than in the ease with which a piece of silver changes its effectiveness. Among the river Pueblos, we could manufacture free-thinkers for a quarter apiece, but at Acoma, the process threatened to be as expensive as a papal dispensation. We appeased their gods by putting away our camera, but having satisfied the Church, we still had to deal with the State. The boldest and fattest citizeness of the Sky City, girt round with a sash of Kelly green, triumphantly produced a paper. Contrary to her manifest expectation, it did not shrivel us. It was written in sprawly Spanish on the reverse of a grocer’s bill, and even at present prices no grocer’s bill could intimidate us; we had seen too many of them. Solomon deciphered it as a command in absentia from the Governor to pay five dollars a head or decamp at once.
Meanwhile the women, from ten years up, had brought us offerings—at a price—of pottery, in the making of which the Acomans excel all other tribes. Seeing a chance for a strategic compromise, through our faithful and secretly sympathetic Solomon, we announced we would either buy their pottery or pay the governor’s toll, but we would not do both. We succeeded in maintaining an aspect of firm resolve, and after many minutes of debate, or what sounded like debate in any tongue, they wisely concluded that what was theirs was their own, and what was the governor’s was something else entirely. We instantly compounded a crime against the State, and acquired many barbaric and gorgeously designed ollas.
We were now permitted to wander freely about the village, though the women after they sold their pottery retired to their houses and kept the doors closed. At the head of the village near where the trail enters, stands the old stone church, forbidding and bare as a Yorkshire hillside, built of giant timbers and small stones wedged hard together. It has stood there, looking off over the cliff, since 1699. Its ungracious front, unsoftened by ornament and eloquent of gruelling labor, fits the hard little village. Its really magnificent proportions tell a story of incredible effort; no wonder it looks proudly down on the desert from the height which it has conquered. Each timber, some large enough to make a burden for fifty men, each rock, each fastening and bolt, came up the trail we had taken nearly an hour to climb, on the shoulders of a little people hardly more than five feet tall. It is the only Indian mission I can remember built entirely of stone slabs, due perhaps to the difficulty of carrying up mud and water in sufficient quantities for the great eight foot thick walls and giant towers.
Between the church facade and the parapet which over-looks the desert is a crowded graveyard, containing in deep layers the bones of many generations of Acomans. Even the soil in which they rest was brought from the plain to form a bed over the mother rock of the mesa. Each year the level of the graveyard comes a trifle nearer the top of the parapet. Bits of pottery clutter the surface of the graveyard, not accidentally, as we at first imagined, but due to the Indian custom of placing choice ollas at the head and feet of the dead, to accompany them on their long journey. It is a bleak God’s Acre: not a tree shades the bare surface. The four winds of heaven sweep it mercilessly, and the hot sun beats down on it. Yet a few feet beyond it becomes glorious, “with the glory of God, whose light is like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.” For the desert below is not a waste of sand, arid and monotonous, but a filtered radiance of light broken into pure color. Those who know only the beauty of green fields and blue waters cannot vision the unreal and heavenly splendor we saw from the Acoma churchyard, as convincing to the inner self as if Earth, that old and dusty thought of God, dissolved before our eyes and crystallized again into a song of light and color, as it was at the beginning.