Many tourists have made the journey across the desert, and the climb to the mesa’s top, only to be turned back or admitted at exorbitant fees. Luck was with us. We arrived on a day when the governor and all the men of the village were at work in the fields of Acomita, and only the women and children, as on the fateful day when the Enchanted Mesa was struck, remained in the village. Our guide, being from Laguna, spoke the dialect of the Acomans, and proved a doughty aid. Hardly had our heads shown above the rocky stairs when the gray landscape was suddenly peopled by women and children; the children clad in one gingham garment, or, if of tender age, in nothing save the proverbial string of beads, for even the smile was missing from their faces. Most of the women, short-skirted, with brilliant floating scarves on their heads, carried babies slung in knotted shawls. Their clamor at sight of Toby’s camera required no knowledge of Acomese to be recognized as vituperative. They seemed as anxious to be photographed as a burglar is to have his thumb-prints taken. They were in fact so uncomplimentary that we recalled uneasily the Spanish monk who visited the town to make converts, and was hustled down to the plain by the short trail. No tourist uses this trail if he can help himself. It leads off the walled edge of the graveyard into space for three hundred odd feet, and ends on the rocks below. With great presence of mind the monk made a parachute of his flowing skirts, and alighted unhurt on the desert. Wearing khaki breeches, we closed the camera regretfully. An Indian’s prejudice against the camera arises logically from his theological belief that nature abhors a duplicate. With keenest powers of observation, he has noted that no two trees, no two leaves, no animals, even no blades of grass are exactly alike. Hence, when he makes a rug, a basket or an _olla_, he never duplicates it absolutely. Therefore he fears the camera’s facsimile of Nature. If he allows himself to be photographed, he believes that something of himself passes into the black box, and thereafter his soul is halved of its power. If he afterward falls sick, undergoes misfortune or dies, he attributes it to this sin against an inexorable law of Nature. It all sounds childishly crude, yet a much respected man named Plato held a somewhat similar belief.