The citadel rock of Ácoma has always been one of the most conspicuous points in New Mexico. For this reason it was mentioned with particular definiteness by every one of the early Spanish chroniclers—Castañeda, Espéjo, Oñate, Vetancur. Always aloof geographically and spiritually from other pueblos, even its own “nation,” and likewise apart to-day from the usual routes of travel, Ácoma lends a piquant interest to the visitor. One wishes to know how much more of ancient tradition and usage have been perpetuated here than in other settlements more accessible and in which scholars have made extensive studies of native customs.[5] The approach to Ácoma is quite unlike that toward either Zuñi or Hopi. The Peñol, as the great rock is often designated, is situated about sixty miles west of the Rio Grande and fifty miles almost directly east of Zuñi. Laguna, nineteen miles to the northeast, is to-day the nearest station on the railroad. From Laguna there is a choice of roads. One of them passes through Casa Blanca, a farming village, by a winding and well travelled way from which one sees the tufa rock eroded in many wildly grotesque forms that invite the imagination. By another, hardly more than a cart track, one goes across bare, rough country and drifting sands, above which formidable mountain walls lift a barrier against the sky of intense ultramarine blue. Here, where rabbit brush is more abundant than anything else, is scant pasturage for the sheep and cattle that look up wistfully at the traveller. A turn of this road brings rather suddenly into view the mighty circular butte of Katzímo, popularly called the Enchanted Mesa, rising out of the sunburned waste. Under a late afternoon sun its precipitous walls and its sharply turreted pinnacles stand forth in vivid tones of yellow and rose. It looks quite inaccessible, in spite of great heaps of talus at its base. These do, in fact, lend little aid toward any ascent, and no kindly zig-zag “toe-and-finger trail” exists. On the southwest may be seen a cleft, as vertical and glassy as the rest. Yet up this apparently unassailable wall occasional ascents have been made by means of ropes—one, within a few weeks of our visit, by two women and two men. Of the latter, one was an Indian who declared to me that nothing would tempt him to venture again, though it is much more likely that his reason was connected with the sacredness of the place rather than with the difficulties of ascent. From near this point we had our first sight of Ácoma. The rock island rises from the austere plain almost as isolated to-day in all essentials as when Alvarado first saw it in 1540 and regretted the effort it cost his men to ascend the cliff—“well fortified, the best there is in Christendom.”