o up from
the pools with jars of water on their heads. Children come selling the
famous Santa Clara black pottery at the train windows; and on the trail
across the river, you see Mexican drovers with long lines of burros and
pack horses winding away into the mountains. Women and girls in bright
blankets and with eyes like black beads and skin like wrinkled parchment
stand round the doors of the little square adobe houses; and sitting in
the shade are the old people--people of a great age, 104 one old woman
numbered her years. As you ascend the Upper Mesas of the Rio Grande, you
are in a region where nothing grows but pinon and juniper. There is not
a sign of life but the browsing sheep and goats. Just where the train
shoots in north of San Ildefonso, if you know where to look on the
right, you can see the famous Black Mesa, a huge square of black
basaltic rock almost 400 feet high, which was the sacred shrine of all
Indians hereabouts for a hundred miles. On its crest, you can still see
its prayer shrines, and the footworn path where refugees from war ran
down to the river for water from encampment on the crest. Away to the
left, the mountains seem to crumple up in purple folds with flat tops
and white gypsum gashed precipices. One of these gashes--White Rock
Canyon--marks Pajarito Plateau, the habitat of the ancient cave dwellers.
On the north side of the Black Mesa, you can see the opening to a huge
cave. This was a prayer shrine and refuge in time of war for the Santa
Clara Indians.

Then, when you have reached almost the top of the world and see no more
sheep herds, the trains pull up at an isolated, forsaken little station;
and late in the afternoon you get off at Servilleta.

A school teacher, his wife and his two children, also left the train at
this point. Our group consisted of three. The driver of the stage--a
famous frontiersman, Jo. Dunn--made eight; and we packed into a
two-seated vehicle. It added piquancy, if not sport, to the twilight
drive to know that one of the two bronchos in harness had never been
driven before. He was, in fact, one of the bands of wild horses that
rove these high juniper mountains. Mexicans, or Indians, watch for the
wild bands to come out to water at nightfall and morning, and stampede
them into a pound, or rope them. The captive is then sold for amounts
varying from $5 to $15 to anyone who can master him. It need not be told
here, not every driver can master an unbroken wild hor