CHAPTER I. THE JOURNEY.

I am 6,000 feet nearer the sky than you are. Come to the sweet and lonely valley in the West where, free from care and toil, the weary soul may rest; where there are neither railroads, manufactures, nor common schools; and, so little is expected of us in the way of public spirit, we almost venture to do as we please, and forget we should vote, and see to it that the Republic does not go to the “demnition bow-wows.”

Santa Fé is precisely what the ancient Pueblos called it--“the dancing-ground of the sun.” The white rays quiver like light on restless waters or on mirrors, and night is only a shaded day. In our summer camp among the foothills we need no tents. It is glorious with stars of the first magnitude, that hang low in a spotless sky, free from fog, mist, or even dew; not so much as a mote between us and the shining floor of heaven.

The star-patterns of my coverlet are older than the figures which delighted our grandmothers. They come out not one by one, as in our skies; but flash suddenly through the blue. Day and night make a brief parting. The short twilight closes, and lo! in the chambers of the east Orion, belted with jewels, Arcturus and his sons, and even the dim lost Pleiad, forgetting the ruins of old Troy, brightens again. Wrapped in soft, furry robes, we lie on the quiet bosom of Mother Earth in sleep, dreamless and restful as the slumber of those who wake in Paradise. I cannot say, with the enthusiastic land-speculator: “Ladies and gentlemen, in this highly-favored region the Moon is always at its full.” But her face is so fair and bright I am her avowed adorer, and many a thousand miles from

“‘a----’ the steep head of old Latmos,”

she stoops above the sleeping lover, to kiss her sweetest.

Old travelers tell you the country is like Palestine; but it is like nothing outside of the Garden eastward in Eden. New Mexico is a slice of old Mexico; that is, a western section of Spain. “Who knows but you may catch sight of some of your castles there!” Such was the invitation which came to me across the Rocky Mountains. I hearkened to the voice of the “charmer, charming never so wisely,” and, “fleeing from incessant life,” started on a journey of two thousand miles. It was in the mild September, and the Mississippi Valley flamed with banners crimson, golden, in which Autumn shrouded the faded face of the dead Summer.

We sped through Ohio, land of lovely women; past Peoria, fair Prairie City, the smoke of whose twenty-three distilleries obscures the spires of her churches beautiful as uplifted hands at prayer; through the bridge at St. Louis, where the fairies and giants once worked together, making a crossing over the great Father of Waters; on we went, journeying by night and by day.

Oh! the horror of the chamber of torture known to the hapless victims as the sleeping-car. The gay conductor, in gorgeous uniform, told us, in an easy, off-hand manner, a man had been found dead in one of the top berths some weeks before. I only wondered any who ventured there came out alive. “Each in his narrow cell forever laid” went through my mind as I lay down to wakefulness and unrest in blankets filled with vermin and disease. The passengers were the same you always journey with: the young couple, tender and warm; the old couple, tough and cool; laughing girls, in fluffy curls and blue ribbons, who found a world of pleasure in pockets full of photographs; the good baby, that never cried, and the bad baby, that cried at nothing; the fussy woman everybody hated, who counted her bundles every half hour, wanted the window up, and no sooner was it raised than she wanted it down again. There, too, was the invalid in every train on the Pacific Road. A college graduate of last year, poor, ambitious, crowded four years’ study into three, broke down, and now the constant cough tells the rest of the old tale. He was attended by a young sister, warm and rosy as he was pallid and chill, who in the most appealing way took each one of us into her confidence, and told how Rob had picked up every step of the road since they left Sandusky. When we entered the wide, monotonous waste between Missouri and Colorado, how the brave girl would try to cheer the boy with riddles, stories, games, muffle him in her furs, slap his cold hands, and lay her red, ripe cheek to his, as if she were hushing a baby. In the drollest way, she resisted the blandishments of the vegetable ivory man, the stem-winder, the peanut vender, and with tragic gesture waved off the peddler of the “Adventures of Sally MacIntire, who was Captured by the Dacotahs. A Tale of Horror and of Blood!” When the dazzling conductor illuminated the passage of the car with his Kohinoor sleeve-buttons and evening-star breastpin, he would stop beside the sick boy, and in a fresh, breezy way seemed to throw out a morning atmosphere of bracing air, as well as hopeful words. “Now,” he would say, twirling his thumb in a Pactolian chain which streamed across his breast and emptied into and overflowed a watch-pocket bulgy with poorly hid treasure--“now we are coming to a place fit to live in. When you get to Pike’s Peak, you will be 7,000 feet above the level of the sea. It’s like breathing champagne. You’ll come up like a cork; keep house in a snug cottage; go home in the Spring so fat you can hardly see out of your eyes.” Vain words. The poor boy knew, and we knew, he was fast nearing the awful shadow which every man born of woman must enter alone. The mighty hand was on him. He was going to Colorado Springs only to die. We parted at La Junta, crowding the windows, gayly waving good-byes. I can never forget my last sight of the sweet sister, with her outspread shawl sheltering him from the crisp wind, which blew from every direction at once, as I have seen a mother-bird flutter round her helpless nestlings. The good baby held up its sooty, chubby hand saying, “ta, ta,” as long as they were in sight, and the mothers smiled tearfully to each other when a rough miner from the Black Hills said, softly, as if talking to himself: “I reckon, if that young woman’s dress was unbuttoned, wings would fly out.”

Five hundred miles across plains level as the sea, treeless, waterless, after leaving the Arkansas River. Part of our road lay along the old California trail, the weary, weary way the first gold-seekers trod, making but twenty miles a day. Under ceaseless sunshine, against pitiless wind, it is not strange that years afterward their march was readily tracked by graves, not always inviolate from the prairie wolf. The stiff buffalo-grass rose behind the first explorers, and even horses and cattle left no trail. They took their course by the sun, shooting an arrow before them; before reaching the first arrow they shot another; and in this manner marched the entire route up to the place where they found water and encamped.

Occasionally we saw a herdsman’s hut standing in the level expanse, lonely as a lighthouse; nothing else in the blank and dreary desert but the railroad track, straight as a rule, narrow as a thread, and its attendant telegraph, precious in our sight as a string of Lothair pearls. Not a stick or stone in a hundred miles. Only the sky, and the earth, clothed with low grass-like moss, the stiff sage-brush, and a vile trailing cactus, which crawls over the ground like hairy green snakes. To be left in such a spot would be like seeing the ship sail off leaving us afloat in fathomless and unknown seas.

After a day seeming long as many a month has, the fine pure air of Colorado touched with cooling balm our tired, dusty faces; and against the loveliest sunset sky, in a heavenly radiance, all amber and carmine, the Spanish peaks majestically saluted us.

Oh! the glory of that sight! Two lone summits, remote, inaccessible; the snowy, the far-off mountains of poetry and picture. Take all the songs the immortal singers have sung in praise of Alpine heights and lay them at their feet; it yet would be an offering unworthy their surpassing loveliness. Now we lost sight of them; now they came again; then vanished in the evening dusk, dropped down from Heaven like the Babylonish curtain of purple and gold which veiled the Holy of Holies from profane eyes. Fairest of earthly shows that have blest my waking vision, they stand alone in memory, not to fade from it till all fades.

At Trinidad we left the luxury of steam, and came down to the territorial conveyance. Think, dear reader, of two days and a night on a buckboard--an instrument of torture deadly as was ever used in the days of Torquemada, and had anything its equal been resorted to then there would have been few heretics.

It is a low-wheeled affair floored with slats, the springs under the seats so weak that at the least jolt they smite together with a horrible blow, which is the more emphatic when over-loaded, as when we crossed the line which bounds “the most desirable of all the Territories.” Our night was without a stop, except to change horses. Jolt, jolt; bang, bang; cold to the marrow, though huddled under buffalo robes and heavy blankets. How welcome the warmth of the sun on our stiffened limbs; and the early breeze, sweet and fresh as airs across Eden when the evening and the morning were the first day! It has a sustaining quality which almost serves for food and sleep. There journeyed with us in the white moonshine spectres, shadowy, ghost-like. Now the sun comes up, we see they are kingly mountains, wrapped in robes of royal purple and wearing crowns of gold. The atmosphere is so refined and clear, they appear close beside us; but the driver says they are forty miles away. Noon comes on, hot and still, with a desert scorch. We journey over a road surprisingly free of stones; across a blank and colorless plain, bounded by mountain-walls which stand grim and stark like bastions of stone. Another night and another long day. The driver is not on his high horse now. He has no funny stories of the grizzly and cinnamon bear, which he assures us can climb trees, sticking their claws in the bark, easily as the telegraph-mender, with clamps on his feet, goes up the pole. Along the roadside stretch beautiful park-like intervales, studded with dwarf pines, that appear planted at regular distances.

Will the day never end? I have no voice nor spirit, and begin to think the wayside crosses mark graves of travelers, murdered, not by assassins, but by the buckboard; and feebly clutch my fellow-sufferer, and shake about in a limp, distracted way, pitying myself, as though I were somebody else. I can hold out no longer. But wake up! Wake up! This is the home-stretch. The horses know it and dash across a little brook which they tell me is the Rio Santa Fé.

Pleasant the sound of running water; tender the light of the evening on the mountains which encircle the ancient capital of the Pueblos. As we approach, it is invested with indescribable romance, the poetic glamor which hovers about all places to us foreign, new, and strange. We go through a straggling suburb of low, dark adobe houses. How comfortless they look! Two Mexicans are jabbering and gesticulating, evidently in a quarrel. Swarthy women, with dismal old black shawls over their heads, sit in the porches. I hear the “Maiden’s Prayer” thumped on a poor piano. How foolish in me to think that I could escape the sound of that feeble petition! Lights stream through narrow windows, sunk in deep casements, and a childish voice, strangely at variance with the words, is singing “Silver Threads among the Gold” to the twanging of a weak guitar. Softly the convent-bells are ringing a gracious welcome to the worn-out traveler. The narrow streets are scarcely wide enough for two wagons to pass. The mud walls are high and dark. We reach the open Plaza. Long one-story adobe houses front it on every side. And this is the historic city! Older than our government, older than the Spanish Conquest, it looks older than the hills surrounding it, and worn-out besides. “_El Fonda!_” shouts the driver, as we stop before the hotel. A voice, foreign yet familiar, gayly answers: “_Ah! Senora, a los pieds de usted._” At last, at last, I am not of this time nor of this continent; but away, away across the sea, in the land of dreams and visions, “renowned, romantic Spain.”