LITMIR.BIZ

      "The Marvellous Country."

       Table of Contents

      "Antiquity here lives, speaks, and cries out to the traveller, Sta, viator."—V. Hugo, The Rhine.

Mention has been made of the towns which the Spaniards came to in the course of their marchings up and down the country. Men had told them, in all soberness, that far away in the north-west seven flourishing cities,1 wondrous great and rich, lay hid among the mountains. We remember that their first expeditions were planned to reach these seven cities. Now, when, at last, the Spaniards did come to them, these wonderful cities proved to be large, but not rich, full of people, though by no means such as the white men expected to see there.

      Though sorely vexed to think they had come so far to find so little, the Spaniards were very much astonished by the appearance of these cities, the like of which they had never seen before. So these cities hid away among desert mountains were long remembered and often talked about.

      But these cities were not cities at all, as the term is now understood. Instead of many houses spread out over much ground, the builders plainly aimed at putting a great many people into a little space. Yet the cities they built were neither simply walled towns, nor simply fortresses, but a skilful combination of both.

      In the open plain they commonly consisted of one great structure either enclosed by a high wall, or else so built round it that wall and building were one.

On the other hand, if the pueblo2 stood upon a height, the houses would be built all in blocks, and have streets running through them, though in other respects the manner of building was everywhere the same.

      In either case, this style of architecture made them look less like the peaceful abodes of peaceful men, than the strongholds of a warlike and predatory race, whence the inmates might sally forth upon their weaker neighbors, just as the lords of feudal times did from the rock-built castles of the Rhine. It is plain they had grown up out of the necessity for defence, as every thing else was sacrificed to its demands, and we know that necessity is the mother of invention.

      The single great house, in which all the inhabitants lived together, is perhaps the most curious. Let us suppose this to be a three-story building, parted off into from sixty to a hundred little rooms, with something like a thousand people living in it. Could the outer wall be taken away, the whole edifice would look like a monstrous honeycomb, and in fact the pueblo was nothing else than a human hive, as we shall presently see.

      A PUEBLO RESTORED.

      Now the city of Acoma is one of those which are built upon a height. The builders chose the flat top of a barren sandstone cliff, containing about ten acres, which rises about three hundred feet above the plain. In New Mexico such table-lands are called mesas, from mesa, the Spanish word meaning table. Therefore, while no one knows its age, or history, all agree that Acoma must go far back into the past. Acoma was so strongly built that to-day it looks hardly different from what it did when the Spaniards first saw it, perched on the top of its rock, in 1582.

      We see then in the builders of Acoma a people gifted with a much higher order of intelligence than the Red Indian, who is always found living in huts, or hovels, of the rudest possible kind. The wild Indian always carries his house about with him, and so is ever ready, at a moment's notice, to

      "Fold his tent, like the Arabs,

       And as silently steal away."

      The sedentary Indian sometimes patterned his after the burrowing animals, like the beaver, and sometimes after the birds of the air, like the sparrow.

      Now to describe Acoma itself. It consists of ranges of massive buildings rising in successive tiers from the ground. The second story is set a little back from the first, and the third a little back from the second, so leaving a space in front of each range of buildings for the inhabitants or sentinels to walk about in, in peaceful times, or send down missiles upon the heads of their enemies in time of war. By running up the outer wall of each story, for a few feet higher than this platform, the builders made what is called a parapet in military phrase, meant for the protection of the defenders. There were no doors or windows except in the topmost tier. Acoma, then, was a castle built upon a rock.

      It would seem that only birds of the air or creeping things could gain admittance to such a place. Indeed, there was no other way for the inhabitants themselves to enter their dwellings except by climbing up ladders set against the outer walls of the building for the purpose. In this manner one could climb to the first platform, then to the second, but could not get in till he came to the roof, through which he descended by a trap door into his own quarters.

      ACOMA.

The whole collection of buildings being divided by partition walls into several blocks, each containing sixty or seventy houses, is, practically, the apartment hotel of to-day. The material commonly used was adobe,3 or bricks dried and hardened in the sun. Such a building could not be set on fire or its walls battered down with any missiles known to its time.

      We see then that the Pueblo Indians must have had enemies whom they feared,—enemies at once aggressive, warlike, and probably much more numerous than themselves. How well they were able to meet these conditions, their houses show us to this day.

      CASA GRANDE, GILA VALLEY.

      Living remote from the whites, these people, like those of Old Zuñi, have kept more of their primitive manners, and live more as their fathers did, than those do who inhabit the pueblos of the Rio Grande, where they have been longer in contact with Europeans. Forty years ago they knew only a few Spanish words, which they had learned when Spaniards held their country. In a remarkable manner, the people have kept their own tongue and nationality free from foreign taint. From this fact we are led to think them much the same people that they were long, long ago.

There are other buildings in the country of the Gila, called Casas Grandes,4 or Great Houses, which are quite different from those described in this chapter, but were apparently built for a similar purpose of defence.

      Footnotes

1. Seven Cities. See preceding chapter.

2. Pueblo, Spanish for town or village.

3. Adobe, Spanish. The same material is much used throughout New Mexico, Arizona, California, Utah, and Colorado.

4. Casas Grandes, or Casas Montezumas. Lieut. Emory, U.S.A., thus describes one seen on the Gila:

Скачать книгу