University of Virginia Library

14. CHAPTER XIV.

Thurstane found the caravan in excellent condition, the mules being tethered
at the reservoir half-way up the acclivity, and the wagons parked and guarded
as usual, with Weber for officer of the night.

“We are in no tanger, Leftenant,” said the sergeant. “A large barty of these
bueplo beeble has shust gone to the vront. They haf daken atfandage of our
bresence to regover a bortion of the blain. I haf sent Kelly along to look after
them a leetle und make them keep a goot watch. We are shust as safe as bossible.
Und to-morrow we will basture the animals. It is a goot blace for a
gamp, Leftenant, und we shall pe all right in a tay or two.”

“Does Shubert's leg need attention?”

“No. It is shust nothing. Shupert is for tuty.”

“And you feel perfectly able to take care of yourselves here?”

“Berfectly, Leftenant.”

“Forty rounds apiece!”

“They are issued, Leftenant.”

“If you are attacked, fire heavily; and if the attack is sharp, retreat to the
bluff. Never mind the wagons; they can be recovered.”

“I will opey your instructions, Leftenant.”

Thurstane was feverish and exhausted; he knew that Weber was as good a
soldier as himself; and still he went back to the village with an anxious heart;
such is the tenderness of the military conscience as to duty.

By the time he reached the upper landing of the wall of the pueblo it was
sunset, and he paused to gaze at a magnificent landscape, the replica of the one
which he had seen at sunrise. There were buttes, valleys, and cañons, the vast
and lofty plateaus of the north, the ranges of the Navajo country, the Sierra del
Carrizo, and the ice peaks of Monte San Francisco. It was sublime, savage,
beautiful, horrible. It seemed a revelation from some other world. It was a
nightmare of nature.

Clara met him on the landing with the smile which she now often gave him.
“I was anxious about you,” she said. “You were too weak to go down there.
You look very tired. Do come and eat, and then rest. You will make yourself
sick. I was quite anxious about you.”

It was a delightful repetition. How his heart and his eyes thanked her for
being troubled for his sake! He was so cheered that in a moment he did not
seem to be tired at all. He could have watched all that night, if it had been necessary
for her safety, or even for her comfort. The soul certainly has a great
deal to do with the body.

While our travellers sleep, let us glance at the singular people among whom
they have found refuge.

It is said hesitatingly, by scholars who have not yet made comparative studies
of languages, that the Moquis are not red men, like the Algonquins, the
Iroquois, the Lenni Lenape, the Sioux, and in general those whom we know as
Indians. It is said, moreover, that they are of the same generic stock with the
Aztecs of Mexico, the ancient Peruvians, and all the other city-building peoples
of both North and South America.

It was an evil day for the brown race of New Mexico when horses strayed
from the Spanish settlements into the desert, and the savage red tribes became
cavalry. This feeble civilization then received a more cruel shock than that
which had been dealt it by the storming columns of the conquistadors. The
horse transformed the Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos from snapping-turtles
into condors. Thenceforward, instead of crawling in slow and feeble
bands to tease the dense populations of the pueblos, they could come like a tornado,
and come in a swarm. At no time were the Moquis and their fellow agriculturists
and herdsmen safe from robbery and slaughter. Such villages as
did not stand upon buttes inaccessible to horsemen, and such as did not possess
fertile lands immediately under the shelter of their walls, were either abandoned
or depopulated by slow starvation.

It is thus that we may account for many of the desolate cities which are now
found in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. Not of course for all; some, we
know, were destroyed by the early Spaniards; others may have been forsaken
because their tillable lands became exhausted; others doubtless fell during wars
between different tribes of the brown race. But the cavalry of the desert must
necessarily have been a potent instrument of destruction.

It is a pathetic spectacle, this civilization which has perished, or is perishing,
without the poor consolation of a history to record its sufferings. It comes near
to being a repetition of the silent death of the flint and bronze races, the mound-raisers,
and cave-diggers, and cromlech-builders of Europe.

Captain Phineas Glover, rising at an early hour in the morning, and having
had his nosebag of medicament refilled and refitted, set off on an appetizer
around the ramparts of the pueblo, and came back marvelling.

“Been out to shake hands with these clever critters,” he said. “Best behavin'
'n' meekest lookin' Injuns I ever see. Put me in mind o' cows 'n' lambs.
An' neat! 'Most equal to Amsterdam Dutch. Seen a woman sweepin' up her
husband's tobacco ashes 'n' carryin' 'em out to throw over the wall. Jest what
they do in Broek. Ever been in Broek? Tell ye 'bout it some time. But how
d'ye s'pose this town was built? I didn't see no stun up here that was fit for
quarryin'. So I put it to a lot of fellers where they got their buildin' m'ter'ls.
Wal, after figurin' round a spell, 'n' makin' signs by the schuner load, found out
the hull thing. Every stun in this place was whittled out 'f the ruff-scuff at the
bottom of the mounting, 'n' fetched up here in blankets on men's shoulders. All
the mud, too, to make their bricks, was backed up in the same way. Feller off
with his blanket 'n' showed me how they did it. Beats all. Wust of it was,
couldn't find out how long it took 'em, nor how the job was lotted out to each
one.”

“I suppose they made their women do it,” said Aunt Maria grimly. “Men
usually put all the hard work on women.”

“Wal, women folks do a heap,” admitted Glover, who never contradicted
anybody. “But there's reason to entertain a hope that they didn't take the
brunt of it here. I looked over into the gardens down b'low the town, 'n' see
men plantin' corn, 'n' tendin' peach trees, but didn't see no women at it. The
women was all in the houses, spinnin', weavin', sewin', 'n' fixin' up ginerally.”

“Remarkable people!” exclaimed Aunt Maria. “They are at least as civilized
as we. Very probably more so. Of course they are. I must learn whether
the women vote, or in any way take part in the government. If so, these Indians
are vastly our superiors, and we must sit humbly at their feet.”

During this talk the worn and wounded Thurstane had been lying asleep.

He now appeared from his dormitory, nodded a hasty good-morning, and pushed
for the door.

“Train's all right,” said Glover. “Jest took a squint at it. Peaceful 's a
ship becalmed. Not a darned Apache in sight.”

“You are sure?” demanded the young officer.

“Better get some more peach-leaf pain-killer on your arm 'n' set straight
down to breakfast.”

“If the Apaches have vamosed, Coronado might join us,” suggested Thurstane.

“Never!” answered Mrs. Stanley with solemnity. “His ancestor stormed
Cibola and ravaged this whole country. If these people should hear his name
pronounced, and suspect his relationship to their oppressor, they might massacre
him.”

“That was three hundred years ago,” smiled the wretch of a lieutenant.

“It doesn't matter,” decided Mrs. Stanley.

And so Coronado, thanks to one of his splendid inventions, was not invited
up to the pueblo.

The travellers spent the day in resting, in receiving a succession of pleasant,
tidy visitors, and in watching the ways of the little community. The weather was
perfect, for while the season was the middle of May, and the latitude that of Algeria
and Tunis, they were nearly six thousand feet above the level of the sea, and the
isolated butte was wreathed with breezes. It was delightful, to sit or stroll on
the landings of the ramparts, and overlook the flourishing landscape near at
hand, and the peaceful industry which caused it to bloom.

Along the hillside, amid the terraced gardens of corn, pumpkins, guavas, and
peaches, many men and children were at work, with here and there a woman.

The scene had not only its charms, but its marvels. Besides the grand environment
of plateaus and mountains in the distance, there were near at hand
freaks of nature such as one might look for in the moon. Nowhere perhaps has
the great water erosion of bygone æons wrought more grotesquely and fantastically
than in the Moqui basin. To the west rose a series of detached buttes,
presenting forms of castles, towers, and minarets, which looked more like the
handiwork of man than the pueblo itself. There were piles of variegated sandstone,
some of them four hundred feet in height, crowned by a hundred feet of
sombre trap. Internal fire had found vent here; its outflowings had crystallized
into columnar trap; the trap had protected the underlying sandstone from cycles
of water-flow; thus had been fashioned these sublime donjons and pinnacles.

They were not only sublime but beautiful. The sandstone, reduced by ages
to a crumbling marl, was of all colors. There were layers of green, reddish-brown,
drab, purple, red, yellow, pinkish, slate, light-brown, orange, white, and
banded. Nature, not contented with building enchanted palaces, had frescoed
them. At this distance, indeed, the separate tints of the strata could not be discerned,
but their general effect of variegation was distinctly visible, and the result
was a landscape of the Thousand and One Nights.

To the south were groups of crested mounds, some of them resembling the
spreading stumps of trees, and others broad-mouthed bells, all of vast magnitude.
These were of sandstone marl, the caps consisting of hard red and green shales,
while the swelling boles, colored by gypsum, were as white as loaf-sugar. It was
another specimen of the handiwork of deluges which no man can number.

Far away to the southwest, and yet faintly seen through the crystalline atmosphere,
were the many-colored knolls and rolls and cliffs of the Painted Desert.

Marls, shales, and sandstones, of all tints, were strewn and piled into a variegated
vista of sterile splendor. Here surely enchantment and glamour had made
undisputed abode.

All day the wounded and the women reposed, gazing a good deal, but sleeping
more. During the afternoon, however, our wonder-loving Mrs. Stanley
roused herself from her lethargy and rushed into an adventure such as only she
knew how to find. In the morning she had noticed, at the other end of the pueblo
from her quarters, a large room which was frequented by men alone. It might
be a temple; it might be a hall for the transaction of public business; such
were the diverse guesses of the travellers. Into the mysteries of this apartment
Aunt Maria resolved to poke.

She reached it; nobody was in it; suspicious circumstance! Aunt Maria
put an end to this state of questionable solitude by entering. A dark room; no
light except from a trap door; a very proper place for improper doings. At one
end rose a large, square block of red sandstone, on which was carved a round
face environed by rays, probably representing the sun. Aunt Maria remembered
the sacrificial altars of the Aztecs, and judged that the old sanguinary religion of
Tenochtitlan was not yet extinct. She became more convinced of this terrific
fact when she discovered that the red tint of the stone was deepened in various
places by stains which resembled blood.

Three or four horrible suggestions arose in succession to jerk at her heartstrings.
Were these Moquis still in the habit of offering human sacrifices?
Would a woman answer their purpose, and particularly a white woman? If they
should catch her there, in the presence of their deity, would they consider it a
leading of Providence? Aunt Maria, notwithstanding her curiosity and courage,
began to feel a desire to retreat.

Her reflections were interrupted and her emotions accelerated by darkness.
Evidently the door had been shut; then she heard a rustling of approaching feet
and an awful whispering; then projected hands impeded her gropings toward
safety. While she stood still, too completely blinded to fly and too frightened to
scream, a light gleamed from behind the altar and presently rose into a flame.
The sacred fire!—she knew it as soon as she saw it; she remembered Prescott,
and recognized it at a glance.

By its flickering rays she perceived that the apartment was full of men, all
robed in blankets of ebony blackness, and all gazing at her in solemn silence.
Two of them, venerable elders with long white hair, stood in front of the others,
making genuflexions and signs of adoration toward the carved face on the altar.
Presently they advanced to her, one of them suddenly seizing her by the shoulders
and pinioning her arms behind her, while the other drew from beneath his
robe a long sharp knife of the glassy flint known as obsidian.

At this point the horrified Aunt Maria found her voice, and uttered a piercing
scream.

At the close of her scream she by a supreme effort turned on her side, raised
her hands to her face, rubbed her eyes open, stared at Clara, who was lying near
her, and mumbled, “I've had an awful nightmare.”

That was it. There was no altar, nor holy fire, nor high priest, nor flint
lancet. She hadn't been anywhere, and she hadn't even screamed, except in
imagination. She was on her blanket, alongside of her niece, in the house of
the Moqui chief, and as safe as need be.