the sand-hills before we began to climb in
earnest; and in that time we had crossed the muddy, swirling Rio Grande
and left the railroad behind and passed a deserted lumber camp and met
only two Mexican teams on the way.

From below, the trail up looks appalling. It seems to be an ash shelf in
pumice-stone doubling back and back on itself, up and up, till it drops
over the top of the sky-line; but the seeming riskiness is entirely
deceptive. Travel wears the soft volcanic _tufa_ hub deep in ash dust,
so that the wheels could not slide off if they tried; and once you are
really on the climb, the ascent is much more gradual than it looks. In
fact, our horses took it at a trot without urging. A certain Scriptural
dame came to permanent grief from a habit of looking back; but you will
miss half the joy of going up to the Pajarito Plateau if you do not look
back towards Santa Fe. The town is hidden in the sand-hills. The wreaths
have gone off the mountain, and the great white domes stand out from the
sky for a distance of eighty miles plain as if at your feet, with the
gashes of purple and lilac where the passes cut into the range. Then
your horses take their last turn and you are on top of a foothill mesa
and see quite plainly why you have to drive 40 miles in order to go 20.
Here, White Rock Canyon lines both sides of the Rio Grande--precipices
steep and sheer as walls, cut sharp off at the top as a huge square
block; and coming into this canyon at right angles are the canyons where
lived the ancient Cliff Dwellers--some of them hundreds of feet above
the Rio Grande, with opening barely wide enough to let the mountain
streams fall through. To reach these inaccessible canyons, you must drive
up over the mesa, though the driver takes you from eight to ten thousand
feet up and down again over cliffs like a stair.

We lunched in a little water canyon, which gashed the mesa side where a
mountain stream came down. Such a camping place in a dry land is not to
be passed within two hours of lunching time, for in some parts of the
Southwest many of the streams are alkali; and a stream from the snows is
better than wine. Beyond our lunching place came the real reason for
this particular canyon being inaccessible to motors--a climb steep as a
stair over a road of rough bowlders with sharp climbing turns, which
only a Western horse can take. Then, we emerged on the high upper
mesa--acres and acres of it, thousands of acres of it, open