Thurstane was feverish and exhausted; he knew that Weber was as good a
soldier as himself; and still he went back to the village with an anxious
heart; such is the tenderness of the military conscience as to _duty_.
By the time he reached the upper landing of the wall of the pueblo it was
sunset, and he paused to gaze at a magnificent landscape, the _replica_ of
the one which he had seen at sunrise. There were buttes, valleys, and
cañons, the vast and lofty plateaus of the north, the ranges of the Navajo
country, the Sierra del Carrizo, and the ice peaks of Monte San Francisco.
It was sublime, savage, beautiful, horrible. It seemed a revelation from
some other world. It was a nightmare of nature.
Clara met him on the landing with the smile which she now often gave him.
"I was anxious about you," she said. "You were too weak to go down there.
You look very tired. Do come and eat, and then rest. You will make
yourself sick. I was quite anxious about you."
It was a delightful repetition. How his heart and his eyes thanked her for
being troubled for his sake! He was so cheered that in a moment he did not
seem to be tired at all. He could have watched all that night, if it had
been necessary for her safety, or even for her comfort. The soul certainly
has a great deal to do with the body.
While our travellers sleep, let us glance at the singular people among
whom they have found refuge.
It is said hesitatingly, by scholars who have not yet made comparative
studies of languages, that the Moquis are not _red men_, like the
Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Lenni-Lenape, the Sioux, and in general
those whom we know as _Indians_. It is said, moreover, that they are of
the same generic stock with the Aztecs of Mexico, the ancient Peruvians,
and all the other city-building peoples of both North and South America.
It was an evil day for the brown race of New Mexico when horses strayed
from the Spanish settlements into the desert, and the savage red tribes
became cavalry. This feeble civilization then received a more cruel shock
than that which had been dealt it by the storming columns of the
conquistadors. The horse transformed the Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and
Navajos from snapping-turtles into condors. Thenceforward, instead of
crawling in slow and feeble bands to tease the dense populations of the
pueblos, they could come like a tornado, and come in a swarm. At no time
were the Moquis and their fellow agriculturists and herdsmen safe from
robbery and slaughter. Such villages as did not stand upon buttes
inaccessible to horsemen, and such as did not possess fertile lands
immediately under the shelter of their walls, were either abandoned or
depopulated by slow starvation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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