IGNORANCE WITH A CAPITAL I
Imagine people living all their lives in Cairo never having seen the
Pyramids. Imagine anyone living in Italy never having been to Pompeii.
Yet we, ourselves, to whom the antiquities and wonders of far countries
are perfectly familiar, did not even know that the wonders of our
Southwest existed! We thought that Pueblo had a nice Indian sound, that
Santa Fé must be an important railroad terminal. Arizona we pictured as a
wide desert like the Sahara, with the Grand Canyon at the top of it, and
a place called Phoenix, appropriately named as the only thing that could
survive the heat, and another place called Tombstone, also fittingly
named, in the middle of a vast area of sizzling sand.
Was there ever any place less like a railroad center than Santa Fé? The
main line of the railroad which has taken its name does not even go
there. A little branch runs to the terminal city from a junction called
Lamy, where, by the way, there is a Harvey hotel, which means, of course,
a good one. This is a word of advice to the tourist who finds the one in
Santa Fé poor. Still, in a city that is old and colorful, and quaint,
one hardly expects wonderful accommodations. The hotel in Biskra, Africa,
did not use to be much to boast about, either.
As for our ignorance about the country, we came across a woman today who
was certainly, at least to us, a new type. She was traveling on mule-back
and absolutely alone! At first it seemed the most daring and dangerous
thing I had ever heard of, but a few minutes of her conversation
convinced me that _she_ was quite safe. Never did I believe a human being
could so closely resemble a hornet. She looked us over as though we might
have been figures in the Eden Musée. Then she asserted:
“Humph! You’re the English people! I saw a British emblem on a car
outside, and it’s easy to see you are the ones it belongs to!”
We denied the nationality but claimed the car.
She shrugged her shoulders:
“Well, if you aren’t English, you’re either from New York or Boston—it
amounts to the same thing! Ever been to Europe?”
We had.
“Ever been out here before?”
We hadn’t.
“I knew it! I knew it the very first moment I clapped eyes on you!”
Like a phonograph she recited a long tirade on the topic of the
“Americans who go spend money in Europe and neglect their own country.”
She asserted the superiority of our own land over that of every other in
generalities and in detail, ending with a final thrust: “What can you get
over there, I’d like to know, that you can’t get here?”
She asserted that a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of modern
paintings was far more worth seeing than the incomparable masterpieces of
Italy; she declared that Egypt and Pompeii held no treasures comparable
with the New Mexican cliff-dwellings.
Our cliff-dwellings like little bird holes along the face of solid rock
in which cave men lived hundreds—maybe thousands of years ago, are
marvelously interesting, but to the spoiled globe-trotter, looking for
profuse evidences of bygone manners and customs and beauty, such as you
find in Alexandria or Pompeii, there are none.
There is, however, we had been told, an Arizona cave-dwelling that has
a mural decoration that can rival in interest the frescoes in Italy or
the hieroglyphics of Egypt. It is merely the imprint of a cave baby’s
hand pressed thousands of years ago against the wall when the adobe was
soft. You can also see cave-dwellings of a pigmy people that lived in the
Stone Age and wore feather ruching around their necks; enchanted pools
that have no bottoms; a lava river with a surface so sharp, brittle,
like splintered glass, that nothing living can cross it and not be
footless, actually, in the end. You can also find, to this day they say,
a religious sect of Penitents who, in Holy Week, practice every sort
of flesh mortification, carry crosses, lie down on cactus needles, flay
themselves with cat-o’-nine-tails, and they used, a few years ago, to
crucify especially fervent members.
But why try to convince people that traveling in the byways of the
Southwest is not a strenuous thing to do? Our hornet inquisitor told
us, “What do you want better than a cave to sleep in? It’s as good as
your European hotels any day!” We forgot to ask her how she got up the
face of the cliffs to get into the caves—a feat far above any ability of
Celia’s or mine. She also said she liked taking potluck with the Indians.
I wonder does she like, as they do, the taste of prairie dogs, and they
say, occasionally, mice and snakes?
Although she did her best to spoil it all for us, we took away an
unforgettable picture of an enchanted land. Why, though, I wonder, did
she want to speak of it or think of it as different from what it really
is? Vast, rugged, splendidly desolate, big in size, big in thought, big
in ideals, with a few threads of enchanting history like that of Santa
Fé, or vividly colored romances of frontier life and Indian legends that
vie with Kipling’s jungle books.