“A few miles farther up the Rio Grande, not down in a canyon, but on the top of a great plateau, nearly 2,000 feet above the river, are two huge castle-like buttes of chalky tufa, each some 200 feet high. They stand one on each side of the Santa Clara Canyon, and are known to the Indians, respectively, as the Puye and the Shu-fin-ne. They are the most easily accessible of the large cave villages of North America, not being more than 10 miles from the little railroad town of Espanola, on the Rio Grande, some 30 miles by rail from Santa Fé. “In this same wild region are the only great stone idols (or, to speak more properly, fetiches) in the United States—the mountain lions of Cochiti. They are life size and carved from the solid bedrock on the top of two huge mesas. To this day the Indians of Cochiti, before a hunt, go to one of these almost inaccessible spots, anoint the great stone head, and dance by night, a wild dance, which no white man has seen or ever will see.”[4] THE PUEBLOS OF ACOMA AND LAGUNA Acoma is 13 miles south of the Santa Fé Railway in the western part of New Mexico. It is reached from Laguna, which is in itself another most interesting place; it is the most recent of all the pueblos, having been founded in 1699. “Of all the 19 pueblos of New Mexico, Acoma is by far the most wonderful. Indeed, it is probably the most remarkable city in the whole world. Perched upon the level summit of a great ‘box’ of rock whose perpendicular sides are nearly 400 feet high, and reached by some of the dizziest paths ever trodden by human feet, the prehistoric town looks far across the wilderness. Its quaint terraced houses of gray adobe, its huge church—hardly less wonderful than the pyramids of Egypt as a monument of patient toil—its great reservoir in the solid rock, its superb scenery, its romantic history and the strange customs of its 600 people, all are rife with interest to the few Americans who visit the isolated city. Neither history nor tradition tells us when Acoma was founded. The pueblo was once situated on the top of the Mesa Encantada (Enchanted Tableland), which rises 700 feet, near the mesa now occupied. “The present Acoma was an old town when the first European—Coronado, the famous Spanish explorer—saw it in 1540. With that its authentic history begins—a strange, weird history, in scattered fragments.... “Acoma is a labyrinth of wonders of which no person alive knows all; the longest visit never wears out its glamour. One feels as among scenes and beings more than human, all of whose rocks are genii and whose people swart conjurors. It is spendthrift of beauty.... It is the noblest specimen of fantastic beauty on the continent.”