If one have time and inclination, the Estancia Valley, its lakes and ruins and Mexican villages may be made the objective of a trip by automobile from Santa Fe or Albuquerque. The roads in good weather are fair, as unimproved roads go, and in the mountain part pass through a wooded region of much loveliness—sunny park-like forests of pine and oak, with numerous rivulets and charming wild gardens. From Albuquerque to Mountainair by this route is about 75 miles. CHAPTER V OF ACOMA, CITY OF THE MARVELLOUS ROCK, AND LAGUNA The oldest occupied town in the United States, and in point of situation perhaps the most poetic, is Acoma (_ah´co-ma_), occupying the flat summit of a huge rock mass whose perpendicular sides rise 350 feet out of a solitary New Mexican plain.[31] It is situated 15 miles southwest of the Santa Fe Railway station of Laguna, where modest accommodations are provided for travelers who stop over. The inhabitants of Acoma, numbering about 700, are Pueblo Indians, whose ancestors founded this rockborne town before the white history of the Southwest began. Coronado found it here in 1540. _El Peñol Maravilloso_—the Rock Marvellous—the old chroniclers called it. “A city the strangest and strongest,” says Padre Benavides, writing of it in 1630, “that there can be in the world.” They will take you from Laguna to Acoma in an automobile over a road, little better than a trail, whose traversability depends more or less on weather conditions not only that day, but the day before.[32] It winds through a characteristic bit of central New Mexico landscape, breezy, sunlit and long-vistaed, treeless save for scattering piñon and juniper. Wild flowers bespangle the ground in season; and mountains—red, purple, amethystine, weather-worn into a hundred fantastic shapes—rise to view on every hand. In July and August the afternoon sky customarily becomes massed with cloud clusters, and local showers descend in long, wavering bands of darkness—here one, there another. Traveling yourself in sunshine beneath an island of clear turquoise in such a stormy sky, you may count at one time eight or ten of these picturesque streamers of rain on the horizon circle. Jagged lightnings play in one quarter of the heavens while broken rainbows illumine others. Nowhere else in our country is the sky so very much alive as in New Mexico and Arizona in summer. Nowhere else, I think, as in this land of fantastic rock forms, of deep blue skies, and of wide, golden, sunlit plains, do you feel so much like an enchanted traveler in a Maxfield Parrish picture.