At Acoma, you
feel you are among human beings like yourself; of different lineage and
traditions and belief, but human. At the Second Mesa, you fall to raking
your memory of Whitechapel and the Bowery for types as sodden and putrid
and degenerate.

* * * * *

Mr. Marmon furnishes team and Indian driver to take you out to Acoma;
and please remember, the distance is not twenty-five or fifty miles as
you have been told, but an easy eighteen with a good enough road for a
motor if you have one.

Set out early in the day, and you escape the heat. Sun up; the
yellow-throated meadowlarks lilting and tossing their liquid gold notes
straight to heaven; the desert flowers such a mass of gorgeous,
voluptuous bloom as dazzle the eye--cactus, blood-red and gold and
carmine, wild pink, scarlet poppy, desert geranium, little shy, dwarf,
miniature English daisies over which Tennyson's "Maud" trod--gorgeous
desert flowers voluptuous as oriental women--who said our Southwest was
an arid waste? It is our Sahara, our Morocco, our Algeria; and we have
not yet had sense enough to discover it in its beauty.

Red-shawled women pattered down the trail from the hillside pueblo of
Laguna, or marched back up from the yellow pools of the San Jose River,
jars of water on their heads; figures in bronze, they might have been,
or women of the Ganges. Then, the morning light strikes the steeples of
the twin-towered Spanish mission on the crest of the hill; and the dull
steeples of the adobe church glow pure mercury. And the light broods
over the stagnant pools of the yellow San Jose; and the turgid, muddy
river flows pure gold. And the light bathes the sandy, parched mesas and
the purple mountains girding the plains around in yellow walls flat
topped as if leveled by a trowel, with here and there in the distant
sky-line the opal gleam as of a snow peak immeasurably far away. It
dawns on you suddenly--this is a realm of pure light. How J. W. M.
Turner would have gone wild with joy over it--light, pure light, split
by the shimmering prism of the dusty air into rainbow colors,
transforming the sand-charged atmosphere into an unearthly morning gleam
shot with gold dust. You know now that the big globe cactus shines with
the glow of a Burma ruby here when it is dull in the Eastern
conservatory, because here is of the very essence of the sun. The wild
poppies shine on the desert sands like stars because, like the stars,
the