We brought the bunch of cattle down to the winter range in the latter
part of November. Early in December the foreman came along with generous
provisions for Christmas. This time he brought with him a supercargo, a
pitiful wreck of an old man he had picked up at Tarpin, the railroad
town thirty miles north-east of us, where the Sitwells bought their
supplies. This old man was a castaway Englishman, Henry Atkins by name.
He had been a valet, and a hospital orderly, and a cook, and for many
years was a table steward on the Anchor Line. Lately he had been cooking
for a sheep outfit that were grazing in the cattle country, where they
weren’t wanted. They had done something shady and had to get out in a
hurry. They dropped old Henry at Tarpin, where he soon drank up all his
wages. When Rapp picked him up there, he was living on hand-outs.
“I’ve told him we can’t pay him anything,” Rapp explained. “But if he
wants to stay here and cook for you boys till I make my next trip, he’ll
have plenty to eat and a roof over him. He was sleeping in the livery
stable in Tarpin. He says he’s a good cook, and I thought he might liven
things up for you at Christmas time. He won’t bother you, he’s not got
any of the mean ways of a bum--I know a bum when I see one. Next time I
come down I’ll bring him some old clothes from the ranch, and you can
lire him if you want to. All his baggage is that newspaper bundle, and
there’s nothing in it but shoes--a pair of patent leathers and a pair of
sneakers. The important thing is, never, on any account, go off
skylarking, you two, and leave him with the cattle. Not for an hour,
mind you. He ain’t strong enough, and he’s got no head.”
Life was a holiday for Blake and me after we got old Henry. He was a
wonderful cook and a good housekeeper. He kept that cabin shining like
a playhouse; used to dress it all out with piñon boughs, and trimmed
the kitchen shelves with newspapers cut in fancy patterns. He had
learned to make up cots when he was a hospital orderly, and he made our
bunks feel like a Harvey House bed. To this day that’s the best I can
say for any bed. And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and
kind as a child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and
defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly
seventy years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage
of him. He held no grudge against any of the people who had misused him.
He loved to tell about the celebrated people he’d been steward to, and
the liberal tips they had given him. There with us, where he couldn’t
get at whisky, he was a model of good behaviour. “Drink is me weakness,
you might say,” he occasionally remarked apologetically. He shaved every
morning and was as clean as a pin. We got to be downright fond of him,
and the three of us made a happy family.
Ever since we’d brought our herd down to the winter camp, the wild
cattle on the mesa were more in evidence. They came down to the river to
drink oftener, and loitered about, grazing in that low canyon so much
that we began to call it Cow Canyon. They were fine-looking beasts, too.
One could see they had good pasture up there. Henry had a theory that we
ought to be able to entice them over to our side with salt. He wanted to
kill one for beefsteaks. Soon after he joined us we lost two cows.
Without warning they bolted into the mesa, as the foreman had said.
After that we watched the herd closer; but a few days before Christmas,
when Blake was off hunting and I was on duty, four fine young steers
sneaked down to the water’s edge through the brush, and before I knew it
they were swimming the river--seemed to do it with no trouble at all.
They frisked out on the other side, ambled up the canyon, and
disappeared. I was furious to have them steal a march on me, and I swore
to myself I’d follow them over and drive them back.
The next morning we took the herd a few miles east, to keep them out of
mischief. I made some excuse to Blake, cut back to the cabin, and asked
Henry to put me up a lunch. I told him my plan, but warned him not to
bear tales. If I wasn’t home when Blake came in at night, then he could
tell him where I’d gone.
Henry went down to the river with me to watch me across. It had grown
colder since morning, and looked like snow. The old man was afraid of a
storm; said I might get snowed in. But I’d got my nerve up, and I didn’t
want to put off making a try at it. I strapped my blanket and my lunch
on my shoulders, hung my boots around my neck to keep them dry, stuffed
my socks inside my hat, and we waded in. My horse took the water without
any fuss, though he shivered a good deal. He stepped out very carefully,
and when it got too deep for him, he swam without panic. We were carried
down-stream a little by the current, but I didn’t have to slide off his
back. He found bottom after a while, and we easily made a landing. I
waved good-bye to Henry on the other side and started up the canyon,
running beside my horse to get warm.
The canyon was wide at the water’s edge, and though it corkscrewed back
into the mesa by abrupt turns, it preserved this open, roomy character.
It was, indeed, a very deep valley with gently sloping sides, rugged and
rocky, but well grassed. There was a clear trail. Horses have no sense
about making a trail, but you can trust cattle to find the easiest
possible path and to take the lowest grades. The bluish rock and the
sun-tanned grass, under the unusual purple-grey of the sky, gave the
whole valley a very soft colour, lavender and pale gold, so that the
occasional cedars growing beside the boulders looked black that morning.
It may have been the hint of snow in the air, but it seemed to me that I
had never breathed in anything that tasted so pure as the air in that
valley. It made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed
to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation. I kept
telling myself that it was very different from the air on the other side
of the river, though that was pure and uncontaminated enough.
When I had gone up this canyon for a mile or so, I came upon another,
opening out to the north--a box canyon, very different in character. No
gentle slope there. The walls were perpendicular, where they weren’t
actually overhanging, and they were anywhere from eight hundred to a
thousand feet high, as we afterward found by measurement. The floor of
it was a mass of huge boulders, great pieces of rock that had fallen
from above ages back, and had been worn round and smooth as pebbles by
the long action of water. Many of them were as big as haystacks, yet
they lay piled on one another like a load of gravel. There was no
footing for my horse among those smooth stones, so I hobbled him and
went on alone a little way, just to see what it was like. My eyes were
steadily on the ground--a slip of the foot there might cripple one.
It was such rough scrambling that I was soon in a warm sweat under my
damp clothes. In stopping to take breath, I happened to glance up at the
canyon wall. I wish I could tell you what I saw there, just as I saw it,
on that first morning, through a veil of lightly falling snow. Far up
above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of
the cliff, I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as
sculpture--and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to
have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close
to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow
windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower.
It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a larger
girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was
something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The
tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and
made them mean something. It was red in colour, even on that grey day.
In sunlight it was the colour of winter oak-leaves. A fringe of cedars
grew along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only
living things. Such silence and stillness and repose--immortal repose.
That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of
eternity. The falling snow-flakes, sprinkling the piñons, gave it a
special kind of solemnity. I can’t describe it. It was more like
sculpture than anything else. I knew at once that I had come upon the
city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa
for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight
like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert.
As I stood looking up at it, I wondered whether I ought to tell even
Blake about it; whether I ought not to go back across the river and keep
that secret as the mesa had kept it. When I at last turned away, I saw
still another canyon branching out of this one, and in its wall still
another arch, with another group of buildings. The notion struck me like
a rifle ball that this mesa had once been like a bee-hive; it was full
of little cliff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe,
a particular civilization.
That night when I got home Blake was on the river-bank waiting for me. I
told him I’d rather not talk about my trip until after supper,--that I
was beat out. I think he’d meant to upbraid me for sneaking off, but he
didn’t. He seemed to realize from the first that this was a serious
matter to me, and he accepted it in that way.
After supper, when we had lit our pipes, I told Blake and Henry as
clearly as I could what it was like over there, and we talked it over.
The town in the cliffs explained the irrigation ditches. Like all pueblo
Indians, these people had had their farms away from their dwellings. For
a stronghold they needed rock, and for farming, soft earth and a water
main.
“And this proves,” said Roddy, “that there must have been a trail into
the mesa at the north end, and that they carried their harvest over by
the ford. If this Cow Canyon was the only entrance, they could never
have farmed down here.” We agreed that he should go over on the first
warm day, and try to find a trail up to the Cliff City, as we already
called it.
We talked and speculated until after midnight. It was Christmas eve, and
Henry said it was but right we should do something out of the ordinary.
But after we went to bed, tired as I was, I was unable to sleep. I got
up and dressed and put on my overcoat and slipped outside to get sight
of the mesa. The wind had come up and was blowing the squall clouds
across the sky. The moon was almost full, hanging directly over the
mesa, which had never looked so solemn and silent to me before. I
wondered how many Christmases had come and gone since that round tower
was built. I had been to Acoma and the Hopi villages, but I’d never seen
a tower like that one. It seemed to me to mark a difference. I felt that
only a strong and aspiring people would have built it, and a people with
a feeling for design. That cluster of buildings, in its arch, with the
dizzy drop into empty air from its doorways and the wall of cliff above,
was as clear in my mind as a picture. By closing my eyes I could see it
against the dark, like a magic-lantern slide.
Blake got over the river before New Year’s day, but he didn’t find any
way of getting from the bottom of the box canyon up into the Cliff City.
He felt sure that the inhabitants of that sky village had reached it by
a trail from the top of the mesa down, not from the bottom of the canyon
up. He explored the branch canyons a little, and found four other
villages, smaller than the first, placed in similar arches.
These arches we had often seen in other canyons. You can find them in
the Grand Canyon, and all along the Rio Grande. Whenever the surface
rock is much harder than the rock beneath it, the softer stone begins to
crack and crumble with weather just at the line where it meets the hard
rim rock. It goes on crumbling and falling away, and in time this
wash-out grows to be a spacious cavern. The Cliff City sat in an
unusually large cavern. We afterward found that it was three hundred and
sixty feet long, and seventy feet high in the centre. The red tower was
fifty feet in height.
Blake and I began to make plans. Our engagement with the Sitwell Company
terminated in May. When we turned our cattle over to the foreman, we
would go into the mesa with what food and tools we could carry, and try
to find a trail down the north end, where we were sure there must once
have been one. If we could find an easier way to get in and out of the
mesa, we would devote the summer, and our winter’s wages, to exploring
it. From Tarpin, the nearest railroad, we could get supplies and tools,
and help if we needed it. We thought we could manage to do the work
ourselves if old Henry would stay with us. We didn’t want to make our
discovery any more public than necessary. We were reluctant to expose
those silent and beautiful places to vulgar curiosity. Finally we
outlined our plan to Henry, telling him we couldn’t promise him regular
wages.
“We won’t mention it,” he said, waving his hand. “I’d ask nothing better
than to share your fortunes. In me youth it was me ambition to go to
Egypt and see the tombs of the Pharaohs.”
“You may get a bad cold going over the river, Henry,” Blake warned him.
“It’s bad crossing--makes you dizzy when you take to swimming. You have
to keep your head.”
“I was never seasick in me life,” he declared, “and at that, I’ve helped
in the cook’s galley on the Anchor Line when she was fair standing on
her head. You’ll find me strong and active when I’m once broke into the
work. I come of an enduring family, though, to be sure, I’ve abused me
constitution somewhat.”
Henry liked to talk about his family, and the work they’d done, and the
great age to which they lived, and the brandy puddings his mother made.
“Eighteen we was in all, when we sat down at table,” he would often say
with his thin, apologetic smile. “Mother and father, and ten living, and
four dead, and two still-born.” Roddy and I used to strain our
imagination trying to visualize such a family dinner party.
Everything worked out well for us. The foreman showed so much interest
in our plans that we told him everything. He insisted that we should
stay on at the winter camp as long as we needed a home base, and use up
whatever supplies were left. When he paid us off, he sold us our two
horses at a very reasonable figure.