Between the church facade and the parapet which over-looks the desert is a crowded graveyard, containing in deep layers the bones of many generations of Acomans. Even the soil in which they rest was brought from the plain to form a bed over the mother rock of the mesa. Each year the level of the graveyard comes a trifle nearer the top of the parapet. Bits of pottery clutter the surface of the graveyard, not accidentally, as we at first imagined, but due to the Indian custom of placing choice ollas at the head and feet of the dead, to accompany them on their long journey. It is a bleak God’s Acre: not a tree shades the bare surface. The four winds of heaven sweep it mercilessly, and the hot sun beats down on it. Yet a few feet beyond it becomes glorious, “with the glory of God, whose light is like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.” For the desert below is not a waste of sand, arid and monotonous, but a filtered radiance of light broken into pure color. Those who know only the beauty of green fields and blue waters cannot vision the unreal and heavenly splendor we saw from the Acoma churchyard, as convincing to the inner self as if Earth, that old and dusty thought of God, dissolved before our eyes and crystallized again into a song of light and color, as it was at the beginning. [Illustration: A STREET IN ACOMA, NEW MEXICO. A flock of ducks splashed in a rainpool in the middle of the road.] [Illustration: THE ACOMA MISSION, NEW MEXICO. At the head of the village stands the old stone church, built with giant timbers.] Acoma, different as it was, reminded me oddly of the New England nature. At its heart lay a spiritual beauty,--this intense beauty of the desert,--and wrapped about it a shell of hard, chill unloveliness. The three little streets, dribbling off to the edge of the rock, had no welcome for us. Its houses, two and three tiered, slabbed with flint instead of the more pleasing adobe, closed tight to our approach. The windows were mean and tiny, made before the era of glass, of translucent slabs of mica, roughly set in the walls. The houses, bleak and blackened, were roughly masoned of the same flint-like stone as the church. The few interiors we saw were barely furnished; a few bowls on the dirt floor, a lava corn bin,--nothing more. A flock of ducks splashed in a rainpool in the middle of the road; a mangy mongrel yapped at us, and women on the housetops scolded whenever Toby ventured to produce her camera. With their colored veils, red skirts and bright sashes they gave the village its only animation, as they brought out more and more bits of pottery to tempt us, carrying it carelessly on their heads down the ladders of the houses.