Though the cliffs of Acoma are visible for several miles before you reach the Rock, you are almost at its base before you distinguish any sign of the village—the color of its terraced houses being much the same as that of the mesa upon which they are set. The soft rocky faces have been cut into grotesque shapes by the sand of the plain which the winds of ages have been picking up and hurling against them. There are strange helmeted columns, slender minarets and spires that some day perhaps a tempest will snap in two, dark, cool caverns which your fancy pictures as dens of those ogreish divinities you have read of Indians’ believing in. Your first adventure at Acoma—and it is a joyous one—is climbing the Rock to the village on top. There are several trails. One is broad and easy, whereby the Pueblo flocks come up from the plains to be folded for the night, and men ahorseback travel. Shorter is the one your Indian guide will take you, by a gradual sandy ascent, to the base of the cliff. There you are face to face with a crevice up which you ascend by an all but perpendicular aboriginal stairway of stone blocks and boulders piled upward in the crack. Handholes cut in the rock wall support you over ticklish places, until finally you clamber out upon the flat summit. In Coronado’s time you would have been confronted there by a wall of loose stones which the Acomas had built to roll down on the heads of the unwelcome. Today, instead, the visitor is apt to be greeted by an official of the pueblo exacting a head-tax of a dollar for the privilege of seeing the town, and picture-taking extra!