CHAPTER XXIVINTO THE DESERT

What has this land lived through? What sorrows have so terribly wasted, what cataclysms rent it, what courage exalted it! Stupendous in its desolation, sublime in its awfulness, it mystifies and dumbfounds at every turn. Smooth plains fall into an abyss, or rise in bleak rock spires. Firm, pebbled river-beds suddenly shift to greedy quicksands; pools that look cool and limpid are boiling, or poisonous alkali. It suggests a theme of sculpture conceived by an Olympian Rodin, splendidly and gigantically hewn and with all the mystery of things not brought to a finite shaping.

But like the Sleeping Beauty in the fairy-tale, the beauty sleeping in the Southwest is surrounded by a thorn hedge of hardships and discomfort that presents its most impenetrable thicket and sharpest spines to the motorist. To see this wonderland intelligently or well, you ought really to be equipped with a camping outfit and go through on horseback. However, if you are willing to turn away from the main travel and strike west from Albuquerque, you can get a few compensating glimpses.

For miles and miles after leaving Isleta, a quite large settlement where there are many Indians and also many tourists, you go on and on and on over an easy gradually ascending road not unlike the long Platte Valley drive, but much more uninhabited. The once dangerous fording of the Puerco River is no longer a barrier to motorists, as there is a splendid new bridge that takes you smoothly over. From time to time you come to a few adobe huts or a lonely little packing-box railroad station, but your road stretches uneventfully on, until Laguna.

There is no need of going by motor to get a glimpse of Laguna, for you have only to sit on the observation platform—or even look out of a window of any train in the Santa Fé Railroad. The pueblo of Laguna at a glance, is a collection of baked earth blocks piled steeply one behind the other against a sun-baked yellow hill at the side of the railroad track.

But to reach the Enchanted Mesa, and the sky-built city of Acoma, you must drive southward from Laguna across a stubbled prairie into a desert valley rimmed with distant cliffs like the walls of a vast garden. As you round a sand dune you come suddenly upon a gigantic round, flat-topped rock, like a titanic pink tree-stump—scarcely a reward for all those miles and miles of dreariness and intense heat, even though its flat-chopped top is a thousand feet clear above the surrounding plain. But when you visualize thestory of that terrible storm that washed the great rock ladder away and left a village of women and children marooned upon that dizzy height until they starved or plunged off to a quicker death, it certainly grips you in its appalling awe.

It is a little wonder that the Indians think it haunted and accursed! For my part it seems miracle enough that anyone ever got up there at all even with a leaning rock supplemented with a notched tree ladder. Scaling such a cliff would be a feat of horror beside which circus thrillers, looping gaps and dipping deaths would be a comparatively tame performance.

A little way beyond the Enchanted Mesa crowned upon ramparts of fantastic perpendicular crags arises Acoma, the skyland citadel of enchantment. You know you can’t be in such prosy place as Here, or within a thousand years of Now. You are standing before the shadowy citadel of some ancient Assyrian king, or more likely yet, you have journeyed into the land of fairy-tales and have come to the castle of the King of the Iron Mountain. Way, way above you, you see tiny figures of the sky inhabitants inquisitively peering down. Several Indians come down from their soaring citadel and look you over. Finally one of them, very solemn and serious, with his shirt-tail hanging out, motions, “Do you want to go up?”

You do, but how? There are only two paths, one hard and short, the other long and easy! Theeasy one is as close to mountain climbing as the ordinary person would want to undertake, though Indian mules and burros make it without difficulty. A burro, and a mule, and a mountain goat must spring from the same species. You clamber, therefore, up the easy road—a stiff, winding defile like the rock-hewn causeway to Valhalla in a Metropolitan production of a Wagner opera, the trail narrowing as it ascends until finally it is nothing but a narrow shelf at a precipice edge. If you are rather light-headed and none too sure-footed you clutch tightly to a stronger, steadier hand and turn your face cliffward as you shakily venture the last of the ascent.

But your reward on top is a prehistoric Aztec citadel of communal houses and occupied by people living today exactly as their ancestors lived hundreds of years ago. An Indian communal house is really a honeycomb of adobe boxes like a flight of gigantic steps; the row on top set back from the one below so that the roof of the first floor makes the terrace in front of the second, and the roof of the second a piazza in front of the third. Against the wall of each story lean the typical ladders by which the Hopi Indian always enters his home. The ground-floor rooms are usually entered through a hatchway in the ceiling from a room or a terrace above.

Acoma is really the sister of Santa Fé, who has never changed her Indian ways. When the noble Spanish invader tried to make a conquest of thewhole family, Acoma met him at the top of her cliff-hewn staircase with a battle-ax! I should think after that climb—the so-called “easy” way had not been built then—one of her brown babies could have pushed him off with a small fore-finger!

To know anything at all about the lives or natures or customs of these people, you would have to see more than is possible to an average, ignorant tourist, who looks helplessly at their inscrutably serious faces. Even if by fortunate chance one of them invites you to mount a ladder and look into a dwelling or two, all you see is a small adobe room with bare walls, a bare floor and possibly a small high window. There is a fireplace in one corner and maybe a string stretched across another with some clothes or blankets hung over it, or piled against a wall on the floor, a water jar or two, and some primitive cooking utensils. Except a few younger members of the community who have been to Carlisle, no one speaks a word of English. Although in a few places such as the Grand Canyon or Albuquerque an Indian will let you take his picture for twenty-five cents, Mr. X. at Albuquerque had warned us not to photograph any Indians we might meet elsewhere. In such places as Acoma it might even be dangerous. Believing, as they do, that a photograph takes a portion of their life away from them, no wonder they object to a stranger’s helping himself to a little piece of their existence.

After leaving Acoma, you drive again long and tediously but without serious hindrance, all the way to Gallup. At Gallup there is a hotel, a small frame, frontier type of building. But by the time we reached it we agreed with Mr. X. that it would be more of an experience to spend the night under the stars. How much the beauty of the stars would have tempted us had the hotel been more inviting I am not very sure. Beyond Gallup you run into the Navajo Indian Reservation, your road having ascended rather steeply through parklike woods of cedars, and the altitude again affects both lungs and carburetor, but even if it makes you gasp a little it is an essence of deliciousness as reviving as an elixir of life. You go past the road that leads to the wonderful Canyon de Chelly, but it is impossible for a motor—any kind of a motor, even the littlest and lightest one—to go over it in the early spring, so you continue on until at last, coming out upon a mesa, you see spread below you the Painted Desert! It can be none other. You would be willing to take oath that a great city of palaces in all the colors of the rainbow lies spread before you. It is inconceivable that rock and sand and twilight alone create these turrets and ramparts and bastions of crimson, gold, blue, azure, indigo, purple, and the whole scene immersed in liquid mauve and gold, as though the atmosphere were made of billions and billions of particles of opalescent fluid. And as you stand in silent contemplation an Indianwith scarlet head-band rides by on a piebald pony so that there shall be no color unused.

Across the Real Desert

At last when the vividness of colors begin to soften into vapory purples, deepening again to indigo, you gather a little brushwood and for the mere companionable cheerfulness make a campfire to eat your supper by. You probably heat a can of soup, roast potatoes, and finally, having nothing else to cook or heat for the present, hit upon the brilliant thought of boiling water, while the fire burns, for next morning’s coffee. At least this is what we did, and poured it into a thermos to keep hot. Also we climbed back into the car. Personally I have an abject terror of snakes, though there was very likely none within a hundred miles of us. For nothing on earth would I make myself a bed on the open ground. Also the seats of our car—there was at least one satisfactory thing about it—are only four or five inches from the floor, and sitting in it is like sitting in an upholstered steamer chair with the footrest up—a perfectly comfortable position to go to sleep in. So that bundled up in fur coats with steamer blankets over us we were just as snug as the proverbial bugs in a rug. For my own part, though, the night was too beautiful out under that star-hung sky willingly to shut my eyes and blot it out. My former fears of prowling Indians, strange animals, spooks, spirits—or perhaps just vast empty blackness—had vanished completely, and instead there was merely the consciousness ofan experience too beautiful to waste a moment of. I could not bear to go to sleep. The very air was too delicious in its sparkling purity to want to stop consciously breathing it. Overhead was the wide inverted bowl of purple blue made of an immensity of blues overlaid with blues that went through and through forever, studded with its myriad blinking lamps lit suddenly all together, and so close I felt that I could almost reach them with my hand.

I really don’t know whether I slept or not, but the thing I became conscious of was the beginning of the dawn. Overhead the heaven was still that deep unfathomable blue. In the very deepest of its color the crescent moon and single star glowed with a light rayless as it was dazzling. Over near the horizon the blue lightened gradually to pale azure and deepened where it rested on the brown purple rim of the desert to a band of reddish orange, very soft, very melting. Gradually the moon and star grew dim like turned-down lamps against a heaven turning turquoise. Down in the valley hung a mist of orchid against which the black branches of a nearby cedar were etched in Japanese silhouette. Far, far on the north horizon the clouds of day were herded, waiting. Then a single cloud advanced, dipped itself in rose color and edged itself with gold; a streak of red, as from a giant’s paint-brush, swept across the sky. A moment of waiting more and then the great blinding sun peered above the eastern mountains’rim and the clouds broke and scattered like cotton-wool sheep across their pasture skies. The moon turned into a little curved feather dropped from a bird’s breast and the star a pinprick; yet in their hour, how glorious they were!

Celia and I tried to find a stream in which to wash our faces, but, failing in our search, we shared the water in our African bags with the radiator. The hot water in the thermos bottle poured over George Washington coffee did not delay us a moment in our breakfast-making, and it could not have been later than five o’clock when we were well off on our way.

It was an endlessly long day’s run and difficult in places. I’m sure we lost our way several times, a perfectly dispiriting thing to do, as it was much like being lost in a rowboat out in the middle of the ocean. Except while still in the Reservation where we passed occasional Navajos we saw no living person or thing the rest of the day. Sometimes we went over rolling, stubbled prairie, fringed again with cedars and pines; next through a veritable desert of desolation with nothing but rocks and sand. Sometimes the road wound tranquilly through timbered glades; again came a straight, monotonous stretch of sandy trail. Then suddenly it twisted itself over a path of washed-out rock, or suddenly fell into an arroyo. Over and over these symptoms were repeated in every variety of combination. Finally we reached Holbrook,and we drove without any adventures over a traveled road to Winslow.

For nothing would I have missed the experience. It was wonderful, all of it, yet no hotel ever seemed so enchanting as the Harvey, nor was any supper ever so good as the one they so promptly put before us.

Of course, if we had had a breakdown we would have been marooned out in a wilderness! No living being knew our whereabouts and we might quite easily have been dust before anyone would have passed our way. If we had had different equipment we would certainly have gone further. Fortunately the most interesting (as well as most difficult) part of the desert was all behind us, and as we also wanted to motor through California, we had no choice. The car was in a seriously crippled condition; any more arroyos and there really would be no more motoring for us this trip. So, all things considered, we hailed our freight car resignedly, put the motor on it and sent it ahead of us to Los Angeles, while we ourselves took the train to the Grand Canyon.

Our Chauffeur Takes a Day Off at the Grand Canyon of the Colorado

By the way, a word about the Navajos whose dwellings in no way resemble the staired adobe pyramids in Acoma, Taos and Laguna. The Navajo huts—hogansthey are called—are made of logs and twigs plastered with mud, not all over like an icing, but merely in between the logs as a mortar. They have no openings except a low door that you have to stoop to enter, and a smokehole in the center of the domelike roof. Inside, if the ones at the Grand Canyon are typical, as they are supposed to be, they are merely one room with a fire burning in the center and blankets spread around the edge of the floor close under the slanting walls. Personally I feel rather embarrassed on being told to look in upon a group of swarthy figures who contemplate the intrusion of their privacy in solemn silence. In one of them a mother was rolling her plump brown baby on its swaddling board. When it was securely tied in place, although the father carried it outside in order to allow me to take its picture, I nearly got into trouble about it. The shutter of my camera had to be set first and then released which made two clicks. When I paid the regulation quarter, he was furious and demanded double pay. I, on my side, thought I was being imposed upon as he had himself volunteered to hold the baby for me for twenty-five cents. E. M., who divined the difficulty, quickly took the film pack out, and holding it open against the light, explained to the Indian carefully, “Little click no picture.” And the Navajo, being quite satisfied with the quarter, I then gave him the second one—a senseless, but commonplace proceeding.

Meanwhile, comfortably lounging on the terrace overlooking this greatest of all great canyons, an old-timer is talking of “the good old days of Hance’s camp before this high-falutin’ hotel was built.” And at his mere suggestion I becomevividly aware that, after all, the way I like best to see anything is comfortably. Perhaps there might be an added awe if one stood alone at the brink of this yawning abyss, perhaps some of the gnarled roads and small clefts that seemed wonderful when we were crawling among them might have seemed dull little places from the terrace of a luxurious hotel, but being at heart—no matter how much I might pretend to be above the necessity of comfort—an effete Easterner, I very gratefully appreciate the genius of the man who built this hotel for such as I.

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