The difference between Plato and the Pueblo Indians lies less in their theology than in the ease with which a piece of silver changes its effectiveness. Among the river Pueblos, we could manufacture free-thinkers for a quarter apiece, but at Acoma, the process threatened to be as expensive as a papal dispensation. We appeased their gods by putting away our camera, but having satisfied the Church, we still had to deal with the State. The boldest and fattest citizeness of the Sky City, girt round with a sash of Kelly green, triumphantly produced a paper. Contrary to her manifest expectation, it did not shrivel us. It was written in sprawly Spanish on the reverse of a grocer’s bill, and even at present prices no grocer’s bill could intimidate us; we had seen too many of them. Solomon deciphered it as a command _in absentia_ from the Governor to pay five dollars a head or decamp at once. Meanwhile the women, from ten years up, had brought us offerings--at a price--of pottery, in the making of which the Acomans excel all other tribes. Seeing a chance for a strategic compromise, through our faithful and secretly sympathetic Solomon, we announced we would either buy their pottery or pay the governor’s toll, but we would not do both. We succeeded in maintaining an aspect of firm resolve, and after many minutes of debate, or what sounded like debate in any tongue, they wisely concluded that what was theirs was their own, and what was the governor’s was something else entirely. We instantly compounded a crime against the State, and acquired many barbaric and gorgeously designed _ollas_. We were now permitted to wander freely about the village, though the women after they sold their pottery retired to their houses and kept the doors closed. At the head of the village near where the trail enters, stands the old stone church, forbidding and bare as a Yorkshire hillside, built of giant timbers and small stones wedged hard together. It has stood there, looking off over the cliff, since 1699. Its ungracious front, unsoftened by ornament and eloquent of gruelling labor, fits the hard little village. Its really magnificent proportions tell a story of incredible effort; no wonder it looks proudly down on the desert from the height which it has conquered. Each timber, some large enough to make a burden for fifty men, each rock, each fastening and bolt, came up the trail we had taken nearly an hour to climb, on the shoulders of a little people hardly more than five feet tall. It is the only Indian mission I can remember built entirely of stone slabs, due perhaps to the difficulty of carrying up mud and water in sufficient quantities for the great eight foot thick walls and giant towers.