orridor
between rocks so close they show only a slit of sky overhead; and to
follow the stream bed, you must wade. Beware how you do that on a warm
day when a thaw of snow on the peaks might cause a sudden freshet; for
if the waters rose here, there would be no escape! The day we went down
a thaw was not the danger. It was cold; the clouds were looming rain,
and there was a high wind. We crept along the rock wall. Narrower and
darker grew the passageway. The wind came funneling up with a mist of
spray from below; and the mossed rocks on which we waded were slippery
as only wet moss can be. We looked over! Down--down--down--tumbled the
waters of the Rito, to one black basin in a waterfall, then over a ledge
to another in spray, then down--down--down to the Rio Grande, many feet
below. You come back from the brink with a little shiver, but it was a
shiver of sheer delight. No wonder dear old Bandelier, the first of the
great archaeologists to study this region, opens his quaint myth with the
simple words--"The Rito is a beautiful place."

CHAPTER V

THE ENCHANTED MESA OF ACOMA

They call it "the Enchanted Mesa," this island of ocher rock set in a
sea of light, higher than Niagara, beveled and faced straight up and
down as if smoothed by some giant trowel. One great explorer has said
that its flat top is covered by ruins; and another great scientist has
said that it isn't. Why quarrel whether or not this is the Enchanted
Mesa? The whole region is an Enchanted Mesa, a Painted Desert, a Dream
Land where mingle past and present, romance and fact, chivalry and
deviltry, the stately grandeur of the old Spanish don and the smart
business tricks of modern Yankeedom.

Shut your mind to the childish quarrel whether there is a heap of old
pottery shards on top of that mesa, or whether the man who said there
was carried it up with him; whether the Hopi hurled the Spaniards off
that particular cliff, or off another! Shut your mind to the childish,
present-day bickering, and the past comes trooping before you in painted
pageantry more gorgeous and stirring than fiction can create. First
march the enranked old Spanish dons encased in armor-plate from visor to
leg greaves, in this hot land where the very touch of metal is a burn.
Back at Santa Fe, in Governor Prince's fine collection, you can see one
of the old breastplates dug up from these Hopi mesas with the bullet
hole square above the heart. Of course, your old Spanish d