Dotting the lonely landscape, flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indian boys with bows and arrows. They fitted the pastoral scene; for a thousand years, perhaps, the ancestors of these same flocks were watched over by the ancestors of these boys in blue overalls. Suddenly to our left, rising from the flat plain, we saw blocked against the sky a shimmering tower of soft blue and gold, seeming too evanescent for solid rock. Its sheer walls thrust upward like the shattered plinth of a giant’s castle from a base of crumbling tufa, in itself a small mountain. It was the mesa of Old Acoma, called by the Indians the Enchanted Mesa. I believe that two Harvard students of archæology once reached the summit of this perpendicular rock, by means of a rope ladder shot to the top. But no white man by himself has for centuries gained a foothold on its splintered walls. Yet once, from legend borne out by bits of broken pottery and household utensils found at the base of the mesa, a large and flourishing Indian village lived on its summit in safety from marauders. A stairway of rock, half splintered away from the main rock was the only means of access to the village. A similar stairway may be seen today in the Second Mesa of the Hopi villages. Up these stairs, old women toiled with filled _ollas_ on their heads, and little boys and men clambered down them to work in the fields below. It is their ghosts the Indians fear to meet between sunset and sunrise. For one day, while the men were absent plowing or tending their herds, a bolt of lightning struck the stairway and in a moment it lay the same crumbling heap of splintered rock one sees today at the base of the mesa. To envision the horrors that followed imagine a sudden catastrophe destroying all stairways and elevators in the Flatiron building, while the men were away at lunch, and the stenographers left stranded on the top floor. The case of Old Acoma was even more pitiful, for those left on the top were old men, helpless from age, women and babies. They lived, ghastly fear and despair alternating with hope as long as their supply of corn stored in the barren rock held out,--perhaps a month, perhaps longer. Then one by one they died, while their men on the plain below tried frantically to reach them, and at last gave up hope. No wonder that when the towering mass which is their monument fades from blue and gold to grayish purple, the Indians turn their ponies’ heads far to one side, and make a loop rather than be found in its neighborhood. [Illustration: ACOMA, NEW MEXICO. Dotting the lonely landscape flocks of white sheep and shaggy goats were tended by Indian boys with bows and arrows.] [Illustration: BURROS LADEN WITH FIRE-WOOD, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO.]