The citadel rock of Ácoma has always been one of the most conspicuous points in New Mexico. For this reason it was mentioned with particular definiteness by every one of the early Spanish chroniclers—Castañeda, Espéjo, Oñate, Vetancur. Always aloof geographically and spiritually from other pueblos, even its own “nation,” and likewise apart to-day from the usual routes of travel, Ácoma lends a piquant interest to the visitor. One wishes to know how much more of ancient tradition and usage have been perpetuated here than in other settlements more accessible and in which scholars have made extensive studies of native customs.[5]

The approach to Ácoma is quite unlike that toward either Zuñi or Hopi. The Peñol, as the great rock is often designated, is situated about sixty miles west of the Rio Grande and fifty miles almost directly east of Zuñi. Laguna, nineteen miles to the northeast, is to-day the nearest station on the railroad. From Laguna there is a choice of roads. One of them passes through Casa Blanca, a farming village, by a winding and well travelled way from which one sees the tufa rock eroded in many wildly grotesque forms that invite the imagination. By another, hardly more than a cart track, one goes across bare, rough country and drifting sands, above which formidable mountain walls lift a barrier against the sky of intense ultramarine blue. Here, where rabbit brush is more abundant than anything else, is scant pasturage for the sheep and cattle that look up wistfully at the traveller. A turn of this road brings rather suddenly into view the mighty circular butte of Katzímo, popularly called the Enchanted Mesa, rising out of the sunburned waste.

Under a late afternoon sun its precipitous walls and its sharply turreted pinnacles stand forth in vivid tones of yellow and rose. It looks quite inaccessible, in spite of great heaps of talus at its base. These do, in fact, lend little aid toward any ascent, and no kindly zig-zag “toe-and-finger trail” exists. On the southwest may be seen a cleft, as vertical and glassy as the rest. Yet up this apparently unassailable wall occasional ascents have been made by means of ropes—one, within a few weeks of our visit, by two women and two men. Of the latter, one was an Indian who declared to me that nothing would tempt him to venture again, though it is much more likely that his reason was connected with the sacredness of the place rather than with the difficulties of ascent.

From near this point we had our first sight of Ácoma. The rock island rises from the austere plain almost as isolated to-day in all essentials as when Alvarado first saw it in 1540 and regretted the effort it cost his men to ascend the cliff—“well fortified, the best there is in Christendom.”

Halfway between Katzímo and Ácoma one June afternoon we came upon a picturesque group of Indians from Ácoma, both men and women, with many horses and burros. It was a lucky circumstance for us that a watering tank was in process of construction near the pueblo, since otherwise almost all the populace would have been at the summer villages a dozen miles away. The women, who had cooked the food for the men at noon, were sitting about upon hillocks of fresh earth, adding color to the landscape with their gay shawls. Our Laguna chauffeur was known to them and spoke their language (Keresan). He vouched for our friendly interest, and brought to us the governor, who spoke a little English, and the war captain (hócheni), who spoke none. The latter was an older man, not in working clothes, but wearing more ornamental paraphernalia. Friendly enough they all seemed, and after payment of a fee for entrance to the pueblo and for the privilege of taking photographs (according to a printed formula that was shown us) we went on, confident that we should get what we had come for. A gift of candy and “smokes” had brought smiles to all their faces, and we parted hoping for further conversation in the evening, when the workers returned to the pueblo.

The nearer we drew to the great Crag, the more extraordinary was the impression it made—a marvelous agglomeration of abrupt escarpments, mighty pillars, and rugged cavernous clefts. You enter as it were upon the precincts of an astonishing stronghold through a half-ruined gateway of outstanding columns, broken by erosion but magnificent still in their strength and dignity. Looking up, you are aware that the grey sandstone walls above are not merely perpendicular but actually overhanging, and are gashed and splintered into scores of crags of an indescribable grandeur. Absorbed in the general picture, you think little at first of the long, even line on the summit. It does of course indicate the blocks of houses, which are so intimately a part of the cliff itself that an approaching enemy must often have been deceived. Nursing the illusion that this strangely carven rock is in truth some battlemented stronghold of mediaeval time, we made our ascent over a long stretch of sand, and then up the ancient “toe-and-finger-hole” trail in the rocks. At the top we were met by women gracefully balancing on their heads trays of fragile pottery. Quickly finding the one whom we sought, we asked if she would be able to keep us over a night. With a grave inclination of her head, but no word, she turned, and we followed till she paused before ascending by a ladder to the third storey of the terraced house where she lived. Leaving our small impedimenta for her to dispose of, we made our first circuit of the pueblo. The quiet dignity and grave courtesy of our hostess never forsook her, but they did not chill us; and while we were with her we felt welcome to make ourselves as comfortable as we could.

Vetancur, the seventeenth-century chronicler, describes the mesa as “a league in circuit and thirty estados in height.”[6] Modern writers estimate its height at 357 feet, and its irregular but practically level top as seventy acres in extent.[7] The great rock is almost cut in two by a savage cleft “like a pair of eye-glasses, a small saddle representing the bridge.”[8] Sand in the course of time has drifted over this dangerous bridge, and with disintegrated stone fallen in from either side, there has been formed a narrow but treacherous passage, which we were told the boys dare one another to cross, but where no man will risk his neck. It will be convenient therefore to designate the two parts hereafter by the terms “north” and “south” mesa. Although there are no signs of human dwellings on the south mesa and no known tradition that it was ever inhabited, Lummis writes of “a perfect cliff-house” perched there on a dizzy eyrie.

When seen from below, the outer walls of the dwellings seem to be part of the mesa itself, merely hewn from the solid rock. Closely approached, they are found to be as much fortress as house. Three parallel lines of stone and adobe, a thousand feet long and forty feet high, running east and west, are separated from one another by calles or streets of moderate width—the calle between the middle row and the south row being left wider than the others, to provide a plaza for open-air ceremonials.

Each of these structures consists of three storeys built in terraces, after a fashion common enough in the pueblo country. The lowest storey is between twelve and fifteen feet high, and had originally no openings save trap doors on its top. It was used exclusively for the storage of supplies, enough of which could be kept there to withstand a long siege. The Ácomas therefore enter their houses by ladders from the ground to the second storey, but the third storey and the roofs are reached by steep and narrow steps on the division walls.[9] In all terraced pueblos, economy of construction was one feature of this type of house. A far more important consideration was necessity for mutual defense, felt by every small community exposed to raids. No one could foresee when would appear a roving band of hostile Navajos, Apaches or Comanches, but their forced tribute upon the crops at some time was as certain as the dawning of the day.

Though in appearance these long blocks of apartments are community houses, they are in no sense communal if that term be used to define a socialistic form of life. Each family or clan is a unit completely separated from every other by very solid division walls. Independence of all but the immediate family or clan can hardly be carried to a greater extreme than with the Indian. Injury or insult, even if sometimes imaginary, may provoke tragic results. Silent and wary by nature, and made suspicious by experience, the Indian is indifferent to the well-being of his neighbor across streets as narrow as those that separate the house-blocks of Ácoma, and he asks an equal privacy for himself.

May this not explain, at least in part, certain contradictory information gathered from different sources in the same pueblo, of which all investigators complain?

The old town shows signs of decay. The western end of Middle Row is now broken down, displaying the construction of the three storeys and the method by which wooden vigas (beams) are mortised into the adobe walls. One of the vigas was quite beautifully carved with the same design we afterwards saw in another house, where it was partly hidden by white-wash. We were told that these two decorated beams were taken from the first church when it was destroyed, and that in earlier days the half-ruined house had been the residence of the priest. Since at present a priest comes from Laguna but twice in a year, it is evident that he needs no permanent abode. Apartment-like as they look from without, they are never connected inside. Within the houses you will find an open hearth for warmth and cooking. In most houses there will be at one end three corn-grinding troughs (metates) sloping like a washboard in a tub. Kneeling behind them, a woman will use a small bevelled slab of stone or lava, of the same material as the trough, with which she crushes the grain, which then falls over the edge between the slabs, each trough making the meal finer than the one before. It has been noted ever since Castañeda’s day, that, if not observed by strangers, the women always sing at their grinding. For several tribes the music for the Corn-Grinding Songs has been written down.[10]

Outside the house, at fairly frequent intervals, are beehive-shaped ovens where all the baking is done, except that of the “paper bread” (guayave)[11] made from blue corn, which must be baked on very highly polished flat stones. These stones, which receive an extraordinary degree of care from the women, are placed upon a projecting part of the fireplace directly over the blaze. The guayave we saw was about the color and texture of a hornet’s nest and tasted rather like popped corn.

It used to be true, in almost all the tribes, that men did all the weaving and women made the baskets and the pottery, but to-day one hears of women working at the loom. Though the men do all the heavy part of house construction, including the carpentering, it is the women who build the adobe walls, and do all the plaster work. The women make a game of it, apparently, and show more gayety than at almost any other time, whereas if a man were to be seen helping them in the very least, he would be such a butt of ridicule to all his comrades chat it would amount to a disgrace.

Once a year before the great festival, on September second, the inside walls of the houses are freshly whitewashed. Against them are hung buckskins and other garments, as well as guns, trinkets and the silver necklaces made by their own artisans. Here, too, adding high color to the motley array, are the dried fruits, the chilis, and jerked meats, all hung from the beams, as a food supply for winter. At night wool mattresses (colchones) are spread on the floors. By day they make comfortable seats against the walls and are covered with gay blankets.

Few are the industries practised to-day by the Ácomas. Apparently they get all cotton and wool material for their garments by barter. A system of exchange has been reduced to specialization among many tribes, so that, if the Navajos now make most of the blankets and silver trinkets, this is no proof that other tribes are ignorant of these arts.

As a rule the Pueblo Indians can lay small claim to physical beauty, though many photographs and modelled heads bear witness to the austere and finely chiselled comeliness of individuals. The Indian of the pueblo, though strongly built, is apt to be smaller in frame and shorter than his kinsfolk of the nomad race. The coarse black hair is either worn loose by the men, or is plaited in one or two queues and fastened with bright-colored stuff of some kind. Those locks which fall over the forehead are cut in a fringe even with the line of the eyes, and a red banda is worn fillet-wise, leaving the crown of the head uncovered.

The men as well as the women are extravagantly fond of ornament, bedecking themselves with strings of wampum or of bright glass beads. We found no surer way to gain their friendliness than to give them strings of small shells, or the more prized abalones that were not too large to be worn on the breast in time of festival. While the women also wear bead chains, they are especially proud of their heavy silver necklaces ornamented with pendants of the squash blossom (emblem of fruitfulness) which are universally and significantly a part of the costume for feast-days. One is reminded of a similar custom in Greece, where the girls wear their dowry in embroidery, and necklaces made of gold chains, at the Easter dances, often described as the “marriage market.”

The fiesta dress of Ácoma has been so often described that it need not be repeated here. We are told that from the eagle feathers on their hair to the rabbit-fur anklets, and turtle-shell rattles below the knee, all is still as it used to be. These picturesque costumes, costly and elaborate, are hoarded and handed down for generations. After one has witnessed a Corn Dance in an open plaza, one cannot restrain a sigh of regret that so much of color and of harmony with the environing scene has been lost to the daily life of a world grown drab and over-conventionalized.

In the matter of dress the Indian is going through a transition period. His native costume is fast disappearing, since the children, after being put into American schools and given dreary American clothing, are apt to feel conspicuous and uncomfortable if they return to the dress of the pueblo. No one who has seen the blue and white checked uniform of a reservation school can but regret this change. On ordinary days there is little of the ancient dress to be seen at Ácoma. The women all wear on the head a shawl or kerchief that falls in soft flowing lines to the shoulder. From the shoulders hangs down the back a gay-colored square of silk (called utinat) generally made still more lively by a contrasting border. The dress may be of wool or of cotton in one piece worn over a blouse with rather full sleeves. A belt embroidered in red and white completes the costume. The older women wear the footless stocking or the heavy white legging, tucked into buckskin moccasins. The half-grown girls usually prefer American shoes and stockings and cotton gowns of the simplest lines. The little children go barefoot, and are lightly clad in one garment. Generally speaking, the men wear a nondescript medley of blue overalls and a loose shirt open at the throat, supplemented by a gay neckerchief. When to this is added some jewelled ornament like a precious shell amulet, or the insignia of office, an embroidered belt, and a red banda filleted about the head, there is still something delightfully quaint and picturesque about their appearance, though so much has vanished.

The first necessity of life to the Pueblos, after security from their enemies was assured, was a sufficient water supply. No modern ideas of sanitation have penetrated this community, and only the wonderful quality of the air, so high and powerful in desiccation, can account for their escape from epidemic disease. After the dwellings, the most striking objects here are moderate-sized tanks placed at intervals along the streets, filled with water for household use. On asking the source of the water upon this arid and wind-beaten rock, one is told of two great natural reservoirs[12] on the northern side of the mesa from which the women bring upon their heads, in three-to five-gallon tinajas, all the water needed for every purpose. Toward the close of day a beautiful picture is made by women bearing aloft with perfect poise these great ollas, or water jars. The reservoirs are large, and so dry is the air at this great height that the water is always cool. I have been told of the children skating on them in March. The larger of the two on the northern side of the precipice we found emptied and scrubbed out, waiting for the longed-for rains to fill it afresh. To our surprise we found the grey rock was ruddy-hearted. The basin-floor was of a warm tone patterned by nature like a mosaic, with a design oddly suggestive of a colossal frog pinned out under a microscope.

Lieutenant Simpson, in his famous report of 1850, scouts the idea that these reservoirs were sufficient for village use and quotes Lieutenant Abert, who three years earlier wrote of water holes near which his men encamped. “Between our camp and the city [Ácoma] there was some water that ran along the bed of the stream for a few yards when it disappeared beneath the sand. This furnished the inhabitants with drinking water.” It is true that, the night we spent at the foot of the Crag, we were supplied with water brought by our chauffeur and an Indian from a spring a mile or more distant.

Not far below and a little east of the emptied reservoir was a pathetic attempt at a garden on a fairly level shelf of the rock, to which some soil had been brought from the far-down valley. Here were one good-sized peach tree and two tiny ones guarded by an ungainly scarecrow. Of any other green or growing thing there was no trace anywhere upon the northern mesa.

A vast plain surrounds Ácoma, and the far horizon to the south is ringed with barrier walls of forbidding strength. Natural fortresses they are, with weird castellated bastions and watch towers. Toward the north, rises the gracious blue Sierra de San Mateo,[13] an extinct volcano regarded with deep reverence by all these native people. Thence came their timber vigas or whatever other wood might be needed by the pueblo, all to be brought by human labor across thirty miles of desert.[14] On the slopes of San Mateo, we are told, are the most holy and hidden places of prayer and ritual, which the uninitiated may never find or penetrate. Well-worn trails run from Laguna and Zuñi as well as from Ácoma to the summit, and I have been told by a resident of Albuquerque of an altar and prayer sticks found there in recent days.

Leading from the top of the Crag to the plain below there are, according to Lummis,[15] seven trails. Of that number we identified six. We found one on the north, one on the northeast, one on the southwest, and three on the west. The seventh, which Lummis calls the “Split Trail,” we did not see. We more than suspect that there are, besides, trails to the south mesa.

Although Hodge thinks there were always several trails, all difficult and more or less dangerous, the only one ordinarily accepted as existing before 1629 was that on the northwest side, called the “Ladder Trail.” It was formed by toe and finger holes cut in the solid rock and worn deeper by the moccasined feet of the dwellers on the summit. This is the trail that came to be known as the “Camino del Padre,” after Fray Juan Ramírez made his famous ascent to the rock in that year. Up such a staircase as this in the early days every ounce of adobe for their houses, and the wooden beams for their buildings, had to be brought on their backs by the patient dwellers seeking safety from the hostile roving tribes.

Not far to the east of the Camino del Padre, the most often used of all the seven, is the dangerous and now abandoned north trail, where Zaldívar made his feint in the most audacious storming known to military history. The Indians call it either the “Runner’s Trail” or “Deadman’s Trail,” but they say it has not been in use for many years. It seems as if the trail described by the earliest explorers must be that at the northeast end of the pueblo, for the much-used toe-and-finger trail is neither long enough nor hazardous enough to correspond to their descriptions. One day when we were standing above the northeast trail, an Indian with a sense of humor called to us, when halfway up, asking for a rope to be let down, and declaring for quite a while that he could never arrive unassisted. Our host said, quite frankly, that he often went down that way, but never came up by it, because “It’s too hard work.”

No trails over the sheer precipices to the east are mentioned by any writer, and none on the south except the one far round toward the southwest, sometimes called the “Staircase Trail.” Over the upper part of this trail are carefully built well-cut steps of wood and stone, but the lower part is chiefly of the toe-and-finger type. Near the top, in a small natural cavern, we found little bundles of twigs and remnants of feathers carefully hidden away, no doubt a shrine of prayer.

Then there is the “Burro Trail,” which we concluded is the one built under the inspiration of Father Ramírez, so that a more comfortable pathway from the plain might be possible for man and beast. At its head is a good-sized wooden cross which still on Cross Day, in May, is decorated with flowers and before which the people used to kneel to receive a blessing from the bishop during his annual visit. Here daily come and go the burros upon their arduous toil below. This trail debouches not far from the wide sand ramp, which we heard called the “New Trail,” a sort of dyke, formed in part by the wind in recent years, and now the easiest footpath up the Crag. The “Split Trail,” which we did not see, lies on the west, between the Staircase and the Burro Trail. It has three forks below, and its main stem, above, is described as a very stiff scramble. I had hoped to see the lower end of every one of these trails, but we were told it was impossible to follow with the car around the base of the rock, on account of the sand, and though I was promised an escort on foot, the man refused to go, when the time came, saying he couldn’t understand why I wished to see where the trails came out upon the plain. Did it seem to him an idle fancy, or was he a little suspicious that we were spying upon the pueblo for some mysterious reason, which he resented?

Near the southern rim of the plateau, quite isolated from the house-blocks, is the great church, still in good repair. Later on during that first afternoon we sat facing the western sky beyond its precincts, and within sight, as we believed, of the famous cleft over which Villagrá made his epoch-making leap in the fight of 1598. Directly in front of us rose two colossal pillars of eroded rock forming a portal through which our eyes were led across the plain to where, over the riven mountain walls, sunlight and an indescribable depth of purple shadow were blending into amethystine haze as the Sun God sank to his rest, just as one has seen it over a boundless ocean. Who can do less at such a moment than join in reverent worship of the Sun? Soon came the men, one by one, from their toil up the steep finger-and-toe trail to home and supper, followed upon the Burro Trail by a great company of those patient little beasts driven by boys into a corral directly behind the church. All was deserted, peaceful, so we also strolled toward our house of friendly hospitality, climbing by its ladder over the first storey and then by shallow steps in the adobe to the next terrace. There our hostess met us in the open door and signified that all our belongings were to the left, beyond a low parapet, on the terrace of a friend, now absent, and therefore available for our use.

To our dismay our host and our Laguna guide were just leaving “for a meeting of great importance,” and with them all our cherished hopes of evening talk and tales of the long ago (hamaha) and the far away. Rather apologetically a man was pointed out to us, sitting by the door, “Mr. Miller, who will talk with you.” I found him to be one who had known several students of Zuñi folk-lore, and who confirmed various things about which we asked, but we learned nothing new. Our disappointment was the old experience. The self-respect of the Indians admits no curious inquiry into their private life, and why should it? How can they discriminate between the truly interested and friendly student of their poetry, and the selfish and unscrupulous exploiter of their sacred inheritance? They have so long been made the target of the unsympathetic white man who treats them as fair game, that they have every justification for suspicion. Trying as it was to us, who merely longed to preserve and record their swiftly vanishing traditions, we could not find it in our hearts to murmur. How many of us would disclose to a casual stranger to whom we had generously accorded a night’s hospitality, the treasures of our ancestral heritage?

When we had spoken our good-nights, the mystery of everything about us grew more profound, enfolding all the world in the eloquent silences of moonlit heaven above and dim floating space below. In such a scene, as we lay upon an adobe terrace, which was of course the roof of a house below, sleep seemed not worth the courting. That may be had in the boisterous town. This was for once only.

At midnight, at three in the morning, and again at six, the Kahera or town-crier—an annually elected official—went the rounds of all the streets, clad in a scarlet blanket and jingling bells like those on the sleigh-reins of children, chanting the while a monotonous invocation. It proved to us the truth of an observation that contrary to the usual pueblo custom of a town-crier shouting out his news from the highest roof-top, Ácoma has always pursued a fashion of her own, sending the man through street after street just as we heard him. When asked in the morning the meaning thereof, our host said it was the announcement of important work at the watering place and a warning to all to bestir themselves. That might be reasonable for the six-o’clock round, but it hardly seemed so for the others in dead of night. We wondered if perhaps it had aught to do with the invasion of the Crag by three Americans.

Almost all visitors speak of the Ácomas as unusually cleanly, and certainly our experience bears this out. But since they lie down at night in their clothes on their fur rugs or thin colchones, one wonders when they get the refreshment of baths or of changed attire. Morning toilets are consequently brief, and we, like our Indian friends, were early astir. Except where the household has adopted American ways, meals are served on the floor in the ancient fashion. There the family will seat itself in a circle around the bowls of chili and coffee and bread. We were therefore interested to observe that this household had assembled about an ordinary rectangular deal table. Here also had come for his breakfast the governor of the pueblo, because he belonged, like our hostess, to the Eagle Clan and had the right to be considered temporarily a member of her family. His own people were already gone to the farm-lands at Acomita and we were told that many others would join the colony there upon the arrival of the children next day from the schools at Albuquerque or Santa Fé.

The whole policy of the community is rapidly changing, for instead of the age-long custom of the men going to Acomita only for the seasons of planting and of harvest, more and more the bulk of the people live there the year round. Why, say the younger generation, should we climb those weary heights when there are no Apaches to fear? Hence many of them return to the pueblo on the Crag only for ceremonies at stated intervals. This makes the atmosphere more sacrosanct than ever, and consequently more difficult for white students to study and record the life story of the Peñol. Although James, rightly enough, calls the people who now live in the lofty eyrie “pleasant faced, soft voiced, gentle and hospitable,” the visitor is never likely to be unaware of an impenetrable aloofness of mind and manner, which holds him far from intimacy. Our hostess soon made evident that she was eager for us to leave early and she more than sped the parting guest, with inviolable dignity but also with very evident relief.

We had, however, an appointment to keep with the governor, who had himself agreed to show us the interior of the great church which brave Fray Juan Ramírez had toiled to create in the early seventeenth century. Surely there are few memorials of the Spanish epoch in the Southwest that present such a picture of dauntless faith in spiritual ideals as does this fortress church silhouetted high against the sky above the bleak mesa.

An impression prevails that the present edifice is not in any part the original one of Ramírez, but one built after the reconquest in 1699 or 1700.[17] In the letters of Vargas he tells of paying a visit to the church of St. Stephen in 1693, after he had received the submission of its inhabitants. In his own words, “the walls are a yard and a half thick and able to withstand the heavy rains that break windows and skylights.”

The interval of six years between this letter and the date (1699) usually given as that of the present church was so patently only the final struggle of the spent force of enmity that it hardly seems probable the Ácomas would take the trouble to demolish their neglected church, especially to the extent of changing its site “a few feet to the south.”[18] We may, therefore, assume that by 1699 the shrine needed extensive repairs, but that in substance we can visit to-day the basilica of Ramírez. It measures 150 feet in length and has walls that are 60 feet high and 10 feet thick. Timbers 40 feet long and 14 inches through support the roof and make a handsome ceiling, for between them, laid in herringbone design, are the stalks of the yucca, colored blue, yellow or red, making a close rush mat visible between the beams. The entrance is by a wooden door at the east, and a gallery just inside is reached by a plain flight of steps close to the north wall. There are of course no seats, and the only decoration of the nave is a crude red dado of paint reaching perhaps three feet from the floor. This and the bare white wall above are freshly done each year before the great fiesta of St. Stephen on September second. At the western end the chancel is raised by three shallow steps. Behind the altar is a gaudily painted Mexican screen done in 1802. To the left hangs the miracle-working painting of San José sent to the Mission by Charles II of Spain, it is said. On the opposite wall is another holy picture painted on buffalo hide by some Mexican craftsmen. The San José painting was for years a serious cause of dissension and almost of war between Ácoma and Laguna, so that it was amusing to have my host pull me by the sleeve and say, sotto voce, pointing to our chauffeur, “Don’t speak of it, he’s Laguna.” To one who has seen the very beautiful decoration of walls and chancel in the Laguna church, it seems unlikely that any envy of Ácoma now exists in that village.

In the autumn of 1924, the Committee for the Reconstruction and Preservation of New Mexico Mission Churches received a gift from a generous citizen of Denver, Colorado, that enabled them to repair the roof of Ácoma church. Their report repeats graphically the ancient story of the toilful work involved. Once again might be seen the laboring procession of heavy-laden Indians and patient burros carrying all the material needed up the steep trail three hundred and fifty-seven feet to the top of the mesa. Once there, it must yet be hoisted sixty feet higher to the roof of the shrine itself. So low was the water in the reservoirs that that also had to be brought from springs in the plain below. The statistics are: 50,000 pounds of water, 24,000 pounds of cement, 72,000 pounds of sand, 5,000 pounds of felt-roofing, 5,000 pounds of asphalt, and 35,000 feet of boards for scaffolding.[19]

Perhaps no other modern task in the pueblo country has so impressed upon the minds of present-day workers the enormous labor or the devotion to a humanistic ideal such as Fray Juan Ramírez inaugurated at Ácoma more than three hundred years ago.

There were cloisters and conventual rooms adjacent to this church which tell of its having been the centre of religious work, and altogether it is one of the most remarkable of the ancient missions; but of it we have few genuine records. That, at one time, the patron saint was changed to San Pedro, the bell in the northeast tower bears witness by its inscription, “San Pedro, 1710.” Subsequently St. Stephen resumed his sway.

To-day the cloister is only a bare promenade of three sides enclosed by walls on the ground level into which a few unglazed windows admit scant light. Upon the dirt floor more or less littered with outcast odds and ends you are shown the hugest of beams, lying prone, which it is claimed came from the early church, and the marvel is how anything so gigantic and unwieldy was ever got up the steep crag, even after it had been brought across the desert from San Mateo. Someone tried to tell us that the Indians waited till rains had filled the arroyos of the mountain slopes so that these heavy timbers could be floated at least part way down the long journey; but my Albuquerque informant, who owns great cattle ranches in the vicinity of San Mateo, assured me that this was impossible, since there are never streams sufficient for any such purpose. He felt sure of the veracity of the Indians, who say that after a viga for a church has been cut and smoothed, it would be sacrilege to let it touch the ground; it must somehow be carried all the way by men. He knew that the vigas for the houses were borne upon the shoulders of men. A pleasanter walk than that within the cloister may be taken upon its flat and unsheltered roof. From there one looks down into the tiny and now very pathetic garden patio in which one moribund peach tree alone stands upright. From there too, he may lift his eyes in rapt admiration to the splendid panorama of the great plain and the encircling mountains.

Above the cloister and built upon its corner, there is a charming loggia with a hand-carved wooden railing of simple but attractive design. Here again the view is inspiring, and one likes to fancy those self-sacrificing priests refreshing themselves at the quiet end of day by resting there and taking into their wearied spirits the peace of so healing an aspect of nature.

It remains to speak of the great graveyard directly in front of the church, “where the dead of centuries sleep unmindful.” It is an enclosure nearly two hundred feet square, surrounded by a stone wall, plastered with adobe. This has been recently disfigured by ill-moulded knob-like heads perhaps a foot high, that stand at regular intervals on its top. We were told they were done during the Great War, and are called the “soldier guard.” Burial must take place within twenty-four hours after death and there is at Ácoma no separation of the sexes in that resting place under the protection of the church. Either the father’s clan or the mother’s clan takes part in the ceremony and the company is made up entirely of men, save that the water jar, which is to be broken over the grave, may be borne by a woman. When the dead body has been tenderly wrapped in its handsomest blanket, it is lowered with the head toward the east, and above the covering earth is broken the symbolic jar of water.

Early one afternoon, we saw a sad little procession coming up the long sand ramp bringing the body of a woman of the pueblo wrapped in a glorious scarlet blanket[20] for burial. The six bearers were carefully dressed; two followed with bulky burdens on their shoulders and one more behind had pick and spade. As they slowly went through the widest street on the summit, a bitter keening was taken up by all the women, house after house, but all from within doors. This lasted until the funeral group were within their own shelter, when the women we were with returned to their work without any evidence of emotion. Naturally we could not intrude upon the burial itself, of which, later in the afternoon, a dull and distant drumming, followed by three or four strokes of the church bell, gave warning. From a distance we saw the censer swung while the earth was being removed, and that only the nine men took part in the last ceremony. Lummis tells us that during the actual interment, the shamans in the desolated house are “blinding the eyes of the ghosts that they may not find the trail of the vanished soul on its journey to Si-pa-pu.” The spirit of the deceased is believed to hover about his earthly home for four days,[21] when a Cheani[22] brings in the feather prayer-sticks,[23] which he has made at home, and puts them where the deceased has lain. Then he offers a prayer and bids him “begone.” After this the Cheani carry these same feather sticks to the gate of Si-pa-pu, a place a mile west of the town where the rocky conformation opens to the north. Meanwhile the household drinks a cedar brew, and vomits. This is an essential part of all purification rituals by which within and without the entire body is made clean. There follows a general head-washing of the kindred, or, as some have said, of all the clans-people. Re-marriage may not occur till the end of a full twelvemonth, and meantime the children have been cared for by the kinsfolk of their mother, with whom the father may also remain, if he is the one left; or he may live with his own people.

An unmarried girl who had died in childbirth on the day of the arrival of Dr. Parsons (from whose monograph this account is taken) was buried without the usual water jar of oblation and hence no broken potsherds were left upon the mound. A feast, however, was prepared, for which a sheep was killed and its pelt offered for sale by her mother. Wafer bread was baked, and a brew of cedar twigs was made on the stove, of which the mother must have partaken, for she was seen going through the usual after-vomiting. It happened to be the first day of the hoinawe[24] dance, but none of this household went out to watch it. During the day the girl’s father had brought in a load of wood, and in the evening he took supper with the American guest and invited her to go with him to see the cacique;[25] that being over, she was taken by the father of the dead girl into two houses to see other dances, an evident proof that the period of mourning was at an end. The next day, being the fifth after the death, all the household had their hair washed and they now watched the dances. One of the women who watched had earlier thrown bread to the dancers. A decoction of the tansy-mustard[26] is drunk “to make them forget the dead,” although it was once described to Dr. Parsons at Ácoma as poisonous.

A second visit to Ácoma brought some new impressions and confirmed or corrected others. To be where the sun is the only time-piece by day and the Dipper by night, and where no form of trade is nearer than nineteen miles, unless one undertakes to transport the delicate pottery of the women, is certainly a unique experience. Through the day we watched at intervals the marvelously deft and steady fingers of our hostess as she outlined elaborate designs upon some large jars, no two being the same, never hesitating for an instant whether it were the hair-line in parallels on the lip, or the curve of a bird’s wing on the rounded surface, of the jar. A younger woman with her yucca-fibre brush filled in the solid spaces, such, for example, as a lozenge or the wing of a bird, all the colors being previously ground and prepared in shallow dishes from minerals collected by the women themselves. During the day ten such jars were decorated.

That night we made our beds on the ground at the foot of the Crag under “crumbling columns grand against the moon” with such protection as we could find from the sand flying before a high wind that blew continuously even after there was no longer any threatening of rain. Dark and heavy clouds threw dramatic shadows on the outstanding towers that rose all about us, taking on grotesque totemic forms, rugged, massive, sculpturesque. If by day the houses seem part of the Crag, by night the entire Peñol takes on even more the aspect of a fortress with outstanding escarpments.

When at last all grew clear, I sat through the hours of darkness under a vast and vaulted sky in a silence so enfolding that it was awesome. Only once the whinny of a horse from a not distant corral broke the stillness; only once some four-footed creature trotted across the middle distance, stopped to watch me curiously, but, because I was motionless, went on its way, thinking, perhaps, I too was no more than an outcropping figure of those walls and bastions that seemed veritably the temple precincts of a more heroic age and race than ours.

Then came the dawn, grey and pearly. As it warmed to rose, we bestirred ourselves, sobered by the solemnity of surroundings and of effects that baffle words—scarcely even to be named beauty because of overtones of a strange and wondrous majesty.

Before saying a final farewell to the Sky City, we followed a road for nearly two miles, a little west of north, out to a point from which may be had the finest of all the general views of the Crag, with its many vertical pinnacles and shadowy coves. From there the length of the mesa-top is better comprehended, as well as the perfect adaptation of the long, low lines of the houses to the natural situation, while the great church with its two very solid towers is silhouetted against the sky as a separate and individual element of the composition. Nowhere can be better understood the keynote of pueblo culture, which is the astonishing harmony attained by the Indians with all the elemental forces surrounding him, especially evidenced in the building of his houses as a part of the natural setting. Five centuries ago the Spaniard found the Indian and his dwelling probably as they had been, it may well be, for thousands of years. To-day, of all existing pueblos, Ácoma has surrendered itself least to the changes which the invader endeavored to introduce and called “improvement.”