of naked rocks like these, hundreds of feet in the air, without soil or
water?
Jacinto shrugged. "A man can do whole lot when they hunt him day and
night like an animal. Navajos on the north, Apaches on the south; the
Ácoma run up a rock to be safe."
All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a
periodic man-hunt; these Indians, born in fear and dying by violence for
generations, had at last taken this leap away from the earth, and on
that rock had found the hope of all suffering and tormented
creatures--safety. They came down to the plain to hunt and to grow their
crops, but there was always a place to go back to. If a band of Navajos
were on the Ácoma's trail, there was still one hope; if he could reach
his rock--Sanctuary! On the winding stone stairway up the cliff, a
handful of men could keep off a multitude. The rock of Ácoma had never
been taken by a foe but once,--by Spaniards in armour. It was very
different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim,
more appealing to the imagination. The rock, when one came to think of
it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned
for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship.
Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave
the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always
being carried captive into foreign lands,--their rock was an idea of
God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them.
Already the Bishop had observed in Indian life a strange literalness,
often shocking and disconcerting. The Ácomas, who must share the
universal human yearning for something permanent, enduring, without
shadow of change,--they had their idea in substance. They actually lived
upon their Rock; were born upon it and died upon it. There was an
element of exaggeration in anything so simple!
As they drew near the Ácoma mesa, dark clouds began boiling up from
behind it, like ink spots spreading in a brilliant sky.
"Rain come," remarked Jacinto. "That is good. They will be well
disposed." He left the mules in a stake corral at the foot of the mesa,
took up the blankets, and hurried Father Latour into the narrow crack in
the rock where the craggy edges formed a kind of natural stairway up the
cliff. Wherever the footing was treacherous, it was helped out by little
handholds, ground into the stone like smooth mittens. The mesa was
absolutely naked of vegetation, but at its foot a rank plant grew
conspicuously out of the sand; a plant with big white blossoms like
Easter lilies. By its dark blue-green leaves, large and coarse-toothed,
Father Latour recognized a species of the noxious datura. The size and
luxuriance of these nightshades astonished him. They looked like great
artificial plants, made of shining silk.
While they were ascending the rock, deafening thunder broke over their
heads, and the rain began to fall as if it were spilled from a
cloud-burst. Drawing into a deep twist of the stairway, under an
overhanging ledge, they watched the water shaken in heavy curtains in
the air before them. In a moment the seam in which they stood was like
the channel of a brook. Looking out over the great plain spotted with
mesas and glittering with rain sheets, the Bishop saw the distant
mountains bright with sunlight. Again he thought that the first Creation
morning might have looked like this, when the dry land was first drawn
up out of the deep, and all was confusion.
The storm was over in half an hour. By the time the Bishop and his guide
reached the last turn in the trail, and rose through the crack, stepping
out on the flat top of the rock, the noontide sun was blazing down upon
Ácoma with almost insupportable brightness. The bare stone floor of the
town and its deepworn paths were washed white and clean, and those
depressions in the surface which the Ácomas call their cisterns, were
full of fresh rain water. Already the women were bringing out their
clothes, to begin washing. The drinking water was carried up the
stairway in earthen jars on the heads of the women, from a secret spring
below; but for all other purposes the people depended on the rainfall
held in these cisterns.
The top of the mesa was about ten acres in extent, the Bishop judged,
and there was not a tree or a blade of green upon it; not a handful of
soil, except the churchyard, held in by an adobe wall, where the earth
for burial had been carried up in baskets from the plain below. The
white dwellings, two and three storeyed, were not scattered, but huddled
together in a close cluster, with no protecting slope of ground or
shoulder of rock, lying flat against the flat, bright against the
bright,--both the rock and the plastered houses threw off the sun glare
blindingly.
At the very edge of the mesa, overhanging the abyss so that its
retaining wall was like a part of the cliff itself, was the old warlike
church of Ácoma, with its two stone towers. Gaunt, grim, grey, its nave
rising some seventy feet to a sagging, half-ruined roof, it was more
like a fortress than a place of worship. That spacious interior
depressed the Bishop as no other mission church had done. He held a
service there before midday, and he had never found it so hard to go
through the ceremony of the Mass. Before him, on the grey floor, in the
grey light, a group of bright shawls and blankets, some fifty or sixty
silent faces; above and behind them the grey walls. He felt as if he
were celebrating Mass at the bottom of the sea, for antediluvian
creatures; for types of life so old, so hardened, so shut within their
shells, that the sacrifice on Calvary could hardly reach back so far.
Those shell-like backs behind him might be saved by baptism and divine
grace, as undeveloped infants are, but hardly through any experience of
their own, he thought. When he blessed them and sent them away, it was
with a sense of inadequacy and spiritual defeat.
After he had laid aside his vestments, Father Latour went over the
church with Jacinto. As he examined it his wonder grew. What need had
there ever been for this great church at Ácoma? It was built early in
sixteen hundred, by Fray Juan Ramirez, a great missionary, who laboured
on the Rock of Ácoma for twenty years or more. It was Father Ramirez,
too, who made the mule trail down the other side,--the only path by
which a burro can ascend the mesa, and which is still called "El Camino
del Padre."
The more Father Latour examined this church, the more he was inclined to
think that Fray Ramirez, or some Spanish priest who followed him, was
not altogether innocent of worldly ambition, and that they built for
their own satisfaction, perhaps, rather than according to the needs of
the Indians. The magnificent site, the natural grandeur of this
stronghold, might well have turned their heads a little. Powerful men
they must have been, those Spanish Fathers, to draft Indian labour for
this great work without military support. Every stone in that structure,
every handful of earth in those many thousand pounds of adobe, was
carried up the trail on the backs of men and boys and women. And the
great carved beams of the roof--Father Latour looked at them with
amazement. In all the plain through which he had come he had seen no
trees but a few stunted piñons. He asked Jacinto where these huge
timbers could have been found.
"San Mateo mountain, I guess."
"But the San Mateo mountains must be forty or fifty miles away. How
could they bring such timbers?"
Jacinto shrugged. "Ácomas carry." Certainly there was no other
explanation.
Besides the church proper there was the cloister, large, thick-walled,
which must have required an enormous labour of portage from the plain.
The deep cloister corridors were cool when the rock outside was
blistering; the low arches opened on an enclosed garden which, judging
from its depth of earth, must once have been very verdant. Pacing those
shady passages, with four feet of solid, windowless adobe shutting out
everything but the green garden and the turquoise sky above, the early
missionaries might well have forgotten the poor Ácomas, that tribe of
ancient rock-turtles, and believed themselves in some cloister hung on a
spur of the Pyrenees.
In the grey dust of the enclosed garden two thin, half-dead peach trees
still struggled with the drouth, the kind of unlikely tree that grows up
from an old root and never bears. By the wall yellow suckers put out
from an old vine stump, very thick and hard, which must once have borne
its ripe clusters.
Built upon the north-east corner of the cloister the Bishop found a
loggia--roofed, but with open sides, looking down on the white pueblo
and the tawny rock, and over the wide plain below. There he decided he
would spend the night. From this loggia he watched the sun go down;
watched the desert become dark, the shadows creep upward. Abroad in the
plain the scattered mesa tops, red with the afterglow, one by one lost
their light, like candles going out. He was on a naked rock in the
desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his
own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and
dreams. Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had
been changing like the sky at day-break, this people had been fixed,
increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock.
Something reptilian he felt here, something that had endured by
immobility, a kind of life out of reach, like the crustaceans in their
armour.
On his homeward way the Bishop spent another night with Father Jesus,
the good priest at Isleta, who talked with him much of the Moqui country
and of those very old rock-set pueblos still farther to the west. One
story related to a long-forgotten friar at Ácoma, and was somewhat as
follows:
4
THE LEGEND OF FRAY BALTAZAR
SOME time in the very early years of seventeen hundred, nearly fifty
years after the great Indian uprising in which all the missionaries and
all the Spaniards in northern New Mexico were either driven out or
murdered, after the country had been reconquered and new missionaries
had come to take the place of the martyrs, a certain Friar Baltazar
Montoya was priest at Ácoma. He was of a tyrannical and overbearing
disposition and bore a hard hand on the natives. All the missions now in
ruins were active then, each had its resident priest, who lived for the
people or upon the people, according to his nature. Friar Baltazar was
one of the most ambitious and exacting. It was his belief that the
pueblo of Ácoma existed chiefly to support its fine church, and that
this should be the pride of the Indians as it was his. He took the best
of their corn and beans and squashes for his table, and selected the
choicest portions when they slaughtered a sheep, chose their best hides
to carpet his dwelling. Moreover, he exacted a heavy tribute in labour.
He was never done with having earth carried up from the plain in
baskets. He enlarged the churchyard and made the deep garden in the
cloister, enriching it with dung from the corrals. Here he was able to
grow a wonderful garden, since it was watered every evening by
women,--and this despite the fact that it was not proper that a woman
should ever enter the cloister at all. Each woman owed the Padre so many
_ollas_ of water a week from the cisterns, and they murmured not only
because of the labour, but because of the drain on their water-supply.
Baltazar was not a lazy man, and in his first years there, before he
became stout, he made long journeys in behalf of his mission and his
garden. He went as far as Oraibi, many days' journey, to select their
best peach seeds. (The peach orchards of Oraibi were very old, having
been cultivated since the days of the earliest Spanish expeditions, when
Coronado's captains gave the Moquis peach seeds brought from Spain.) His
grape cuttings were brought from Sonora in baskets on muleback, and he
would go all the way to the Villa (Santa Fé) for choice garden seeds,
at the season when pack trains came up the Rio Grande valley. The early
churchmen did a great business in carrying seeds about, though the
Indians and Mexicans were satisfied with beans and squashes and chili,
asking nothing more.
Friar Baltazar was from a religious house in Spain which was noted for
good living, and he himself had worked in the refectory. He was an
excellent cook and something of a carpenter, and he took a great deal of
trouble to make himself comfortable upon that rock at the end of the
world. He drafted two Indian boys into his service, one to care for his
ass and work in the garden, the other to cook and wait upon him at
table. In time, as he grew more unwieldy in figure, he adopted a third
boy and employed him as a runner to the distant missions. This boy would
go on foot all the way to the Villa for red cloth or an iron spade or a
new knife, stopping at Bernalillo to bring home a wineskin full of grape
brandy. He would go five days' journey to the Sandia mountains to catch
fish and dry or salt them for the Padre's fast-days, or run to Zuñi,
where the Fathers raised rabbits, and bring back a pair for the spit.
His errands were seldom of an ecclesiastical nature.
It was clear that the Friar at Ácoma lived more after the flesh than
after the spirit. The difficulty of obtaining an interesting and varied
diet on a naked rock seemed only to whet his appetite and tempt his
resourcefulness. But his sensuality went no further than his garden and
table. Carnal commerce with the Indian women would have been very easy
indeed, and the Friar was at the hardy age of ripe manhood when such
temptations are peculiarly sharp. But the missionaries had early
discovered that the slightest departure from chastity greatly weakened
their influence and authority with their Indian converts. The Indians
themselves sometimes practised continence as a penance, or as a strong
medicine with the spirits, and they were very willing that their Padre
should practise it for them. The consequences of carnal indulgence were
perhaps more serious here than in Spain, and Friar Baltazar seems never
to have given his flock an opportunity to exult over his frailty.
He held his seat at Ácoma for nearly fifteen prosperous years,
constantly improving his church and his living-quarters, growing new
vegetables and medicinal herbs, making soap from the yucca root. Even
after he became stout, his arms were strong and muscular, his fingers
clever. He cultivated his peach trees, and watched over his garden like
a little kingdom, never allowing the native women to grow slack in the
water-supply. His first serving-boys were released to marry, and others
succeeded them, who were even more minutely trained.
Baltazar's tyranny grew little by little, and the Ácoma people were
sometimes at the point of revolt. But they could not estimate just how
powerful the Padre's magic might be and were afraid to put it to the
test. There was no doubt that the holy picture of St. Joseph had come to
them from the King of Spain by the request of this Padre, and that
picture had been more effective in averting drouth than all the native
rain-makers had been. Properly entreated and honoured, the painting had
never failed to produce rain. Ácoma had not lost its crops since Friar
Baltazar first brought the picture to them, though at Laguna and Zuñi
there had been drouths that compelled the people to live upon their
famine store,--an alarming extremity.
The Laguna Indians were constantly sending legations to Ácoma to
negotiate terms at which they could rent the holy picture, but Friar
Baltazar had warned them never to let it go. If such powerful protection
were withdrawn, or if the Padre should turn the magic against them, the
consequences might be disastrous to the pueblo. Better give him his
choice of grain and lambs and pottery, and allow him his three
serving-boys. So the missionary and his converts rubbed along in seeming
friendliness.
One summer the Friar, who did not make long journeys now that he had
grown large in girth, decided that he would like company,--someone to
admire his fine garden, his ingenious kitchen, his airy loggia with its
rugs and water jars, where he meditated and took his after-dinner
siesta. So he planned to give a dinner party in the week after St.
John's Day.
He sent his runner to Zuñi, Laguna, Isleta, and bade the Padres to a
feast. They came upon the day, four of them, for there were two priests
at Zuñi. The stable-boy was stationed at the foot of the rock to take
their beasts and conduct the visitors up the stairway. At the head of
the trail Baltazar received them. They were shown over the place, and
spent the morning gossiping in the cloister walks, cool and silent,
though the naked rock outside was almost too hot for the hand to touch.
The vine leaves rustled agreeably in the breeze, and the earth about the
carrot and onion tops, as it dried from last night's watering, gave off
a pleasant smell. The guests thought their host lived very well, and
they wished they had his secret. If he was a trifle boastful of his
air-bound seat, no one could blame him.
With the dinner, Baltazar had taken extravagant pains. The monastery in
which he had learned to cook was off the main highway to Seville; the
Spanish nobles and the King himself sometimes stopped there for
entertainment. In that great kitchen, with its multiplicity of spits,
small enough to roast a lark and large enough to roast a boar, the Friar
had learned a thing or two about sauces, and in his lonely years at
Ácoma he had bettered his instruction by a natural aptitude for the
art. The poverty of materials had proved an incentive rather than a
discouragement.
Certainly the visiting missionaries had never sat down to food like that
which rejoiced them to-day in the cool refectory, the blinds open just
enough to admit a streak of throbbing desert far below them. Their host
was telling them pompously that he would have a fountain in the cloister
close when they came again. He had to check his hungry guests in their
zeal for the relishes and the soup, warning them to save their mettle
for what was to come. The roast was to be a wild turkey, superbly
done--but that, alas, was never tasted. The course which preceded it was
the host's especial care, and here he had trusted nothing to his cook;
hare _jardinière_ (his carrots and onions were tender and well
flavoured), with a sauce which he had been perfecting for many years.
This entrée was brought from the kitchen in a large earthen dish--but
not large enough, for with its luxury of sauce and floating carrots it
filled the platter to the brim. The stable-boy was serving to-day, as
the cook could not leave his spits, and he had been neat, brisk, and
efficient. The Friar was pleased with him, and was wondering whether he
could not find some little medal of bronze or silver-gilt to reward him
for his pains.
When the hare in its sauce came on, the priest from Isleta chanced to be
telling a funny story at which the company were laughing uproariously.
The serving-boy, who knew a little Spanish, was apparently trying to get
the point of the recital which made the Padres so merry. At any rate, he
became distracted, and as he passed behind the senior priest of Zuñi,
he tipped his full platter and spilled a stream of rich brown gravy over
the good man's head and shoulders. Baltazar was quick-tempered, and he
had been drinking freely of the fiery grape brandy. He caught up the
empty pewter mug at his right and threw it at the clumsy lad with a
malediction. It struck the boy on the side of the head. He dropped the
platter, staggered a few steps, and fell down. He did not get up, nor
did he move. The Padre from Zuñi was skilled in medicine. Wiping the
sauce from his eyes, he bent over the boy and examined him.
"_Muerto_," he whispered. With that he plucked his junior priest by the
sleeve, and the two bolted across the garden without another word and
made for the head of the stairway. In a moment the Padres of Laguna and
Isleta unceremoniously followed their example. With remarkable speed the
four guests got them down from the rock, saddled their mules, and urged
them across the plain.
Baltazar was left alone with the consequences of his haste.
Unfortunately the cook, astonished at the prolonged silence, had looked
in at the door just as the last pair of brown gowns were vanishing
across the cloister. He saw his comrade lying upon the floor, and
silently disappeared from the premises by an exit known only to himself.
When Friar Baltazar went into the kitchen he found it solitary, the
turkey still dripping on the spit. Certainly he had no appetite for the
roast. He felt, indeed, very remorseful and uncomfortable, also
indignant with his departed guests. For a moment he entertained the idea
of following them; but a temporary flight would only weaken his
position, and a permanent evacuation was not to be thought of. His
garden was at its prime, his peaches were just coming ripe, and his
vines hung heavy with green clusters. Mechanically he took the turkey
from the spit, not because he felt any inclination for food, but from an
instinct of compassion, quite as if the bird could suffer from being
burned to a crisp. This done, he repaired to his loggia and sat down to
read his breviary, which he had neglected for several days, having been
so occupied in the refectory. He had begrudged no pains to that sauce
which had been his undoing.
The airy loggia, where he customarily took his afternoon repose, was
like a birdcage hung in the breeze. Through its open archways he looked
down on the huddled pueblo, and out over the great mesa-strewn plain far
below. He was unable to fix his mind upon his office. The pueblo down
there was much too quiet. At this hour there should be a few women
washing pots or rags, a few children playing by the cisterns and chasing
the turkeys. But to-day the rock top baked in the fire of the sun in
utter silence, not one human being was visible--yes, one, though he had
not been there a moment ago. At the head of the stone stairway, there
was a patch of lustrous black, just above the rocks; an Indian's hair.
They had set a guard at the trail head.
Now the Padre began to feel alarmed, to wish he had gone down that
stairway with the others, while there was yet time. He wished he were
anywhere in the world but on this rock. There was old Father Ramirez's
donkey path; but if the Indians were watching one road, they would watch
the other. The spot of black hair never stirred; and there were but
those two ways down to the plain, only those ... Whichever way one
turned, three hundred and fifty feet of naked cliff, without one tree or
shrub a man could cling to.
As the sun sank lower and lower, there began a deep, singing murmur of
male voices from the pueblo below him, not a chant, but the rhythmical
intonation of Indian oratory when a serious matter is under discussion.
Frightful stories of the torture of the missionaries in the great
rebellion of 1680 flashed into Friar Baltazar's mind; how one Franciscan
had his eyes torn out, another had been burned, and the old Padre at
Jamez had been stripped naked and driven on all fours about the plaza
all night, with drunken Indians straddling his back, until he rolled
over dead from exhaustion.
Moonrise from the loggia was an impressive sight, even to this Brother
who was not over-impressionable. But to-night he wished he could keep
the moon from coming up through the floor of the desert,--the moon was
the clock which began things in the pueblo. He watched with horror for
that golden rim against the deep blue velvet of the night.
The moon came, and at its coming the Ácoma people issued from their
doors. A company of men walked silently across the rock to the cloister.
They came up the ladder and appeared in the loggia. The Friar asked them
gruffly what they wanted, but they made no reply. Not once speaking to
him or to each other, they bound his feet together and tied his arms to
his sides.