CHAPTER VII. TO THE TURQUOIS MINES. (_Continued._)

Traveling westward, there came to our view the first Placer Mountain; behind it the melon-shaped Sandia, 13,000 feet in air; and far southward the detached range of the Manzana Mountains. A plateau, the highest of equal area on the globe, varied with sterile _vegas_ and dreary sierras, which reminded the early adventurers of their own Old Castile, and so like it one can imagine it had once been the home of wandering tribes, which have long since taken up their spears, struck their tents, and sought new camps in the furthest East.

The grama grass is low and dry, like wiry moss, and in the distance takes a wan, ashen hue, more ghastly than white. The cactus is the only shrub in sight. A gaunt, starved thing, the leper of the vegetable world, forbidding our approach.

The lively prairie dog (who is no dog, but a marmot) saluted as we passed. Having early learned the fifth beatitude, I suppress a description of him. Nor shall we ask how he exists without water, or seek to know if there is a snake at the bottom of his den, and a strange bird dwelling there in peace and safety.

It was June; but not the leafy month of June. The only timber--dwarf cedar--which can grow in this barren soil was cut away years ago; and absence of trees includes absence of birds. The friendly trill and flutter heard about nests in shady places are sadly missed. Now and then a black wing flapped overhead, and a crow flew down in the road. Living equally well on seed, roots, flesh, he thrives alike in all places. And, except this one sign of life, we may journey in some directions a whole day and see neither man nor beast, bird nor insect. We missed the woodland scents, too; the forest fragrance of mint, thyme, pennyroyal, and the beeches, whose shadows are the curtains of the morning, holding its freshness against the power of the sun till high noon. The eye soon wearies of the leaden hues, and longs for the dark leafage which is the glory of the Mississippi Valley. The blank, scorched plain, lying stark and still in the fierce, white light, brought a sense of loneliness and depression impossible to shake off. There was no rest for the sight or the soul.

But what is this apparition starting from a distant clump of greasewood--a grisly animal, apparently neither brute nor human? Rapidly coming toward us, we recognize a creature of the _genus homo_. “In the desert no one meets a friend,” says the Oriental proverb; and there was a general stir for arms among the defenders, and mute shaking of the head, not intended to be seen, when nothing more serviceable than a cactus cane was found in the ambulance.

Every reader knows the border is the chosen field of the dime-novel hero; a safe refuge for cut-throats and desperadoes of the lowest grades, who live by robbery and plunder, and that it is wise for the tourist to put on his pistol with his watch, or, in the expressive slang of the frontier, he may be blighted by lead fever before sundown.

Outlaws from Mexico and Texas haunt the mountain springs and prowl about the cañons of the territories; and, in dread of them, hunters go in parties, and look well to their arms when they enter narrow defiles or a dark, lonesome gulch.

These vagabonds subsist on the fat of the land, where the country is most sparsely settled, and are the only buyers who have credit and are not crowded for payment by the Israelites who control the dry goods business of the territory. The ranchero never refuses them milk, eggs, or mutton; and the dark-eyed Mexican girl serves them with diligence, under promise of payment when they come again. Given a voice in the matter, this is not such a character as we like to encounter on an empty plain, even in broad daylight; and, as he neared us, the ladies involuntarily drew close together and scanned him thoroughly.

A powerful fellow, of giant frame and dangerous muscle, and, though unarmed, a foe to dread in any fight. He wore a shoddy coat, probably bought on compulsory credit of the Wandering Jew of Tularosa; buckskin pants, with fringed side-stripes of Indian work, tucked inside of heavy cavalry boots, ponderous brass spurs jingling as he walked; a red cotton handkerchief knotted around his throat. An immense slouched _sombrero_--in the style of the Mexican _caballero_--drab, with a rosette and cord of red and tinsel, covered his forehead and shaded eyes that were restless and penetrating like a blackbird’s. A shaggy, unshorn mane, reddened with dust and sunburn, fell over the buffalo neck and shoulders; matted beard, a very jungle, reached almost to the cartridge-belt, and, blown aside by the wind, revealed the outline of revolvers in his breast-pockets. He carried a Winchester rifle easily as a gentleman carries his cane; a leather belt, buckled around his waist, was filled with cartridges, and bore a murderous-looking knife in its sheath.

When this shape, of aspect threatening and sinister, came within friendly hail, we bowed with much suavity.

“Texas Jack! _Buenos dias!_” said Juan Fresco, who well became his name; and serene as summer, he shifted the reins and laid his hand on the _navaja_.

The frontiersman touched his hat-brim with his big forefinger, sunburnt to a vermilion red, quietly passed on toward the Galisteo, and we saw him no more. When fairly out of sight of the outlaw, we felt brave as lions.

“A prospector,” said one, mildly.

“Yes, and never without a prospect,” said the antiquarian, bringing out an old witticism.

“A black sheep without any white spots,” added another. “They always spring up on the frontier.”

And, very hilarious under the sense of relief, we courageously debated what we would have done had the robber attempted robbery and ordered us to hold up our hands. The men of the pen would have been mere boys in the grip of this son of the border; and we cheered ourselves with telling tales of how “just such men” had gone out without pistols to seek their fortunes, and had never been heard of afterward.

The weakest of weeklies is dull and insipid compared with the daily experiences recounted in New Mexico; and restless souls who hate trammels, who love danger for its own sake, and have looked death in the face till they cease to fear it, find a special charm in the wild “game flavor” of the frontier.

The borderer who crossed our path was the sort of soldier who in March, 1862, under the rebel General Sibley, came up from Texas, forded the Rio Grande at a point below Fort Craig, fought the Union troops under Gen. Canby at Valverde, and again at Cañon Glorietta, fifteen miles from Santa Fé. In that narrow pass, where flanking was out of the question, a severe fight between infantry and artillery occurred, in which the rebels were victorious, and Sibley entered the capital city without meeting further resistance.

His Texan Rangers, like Texas Jack, were half savage; a desperate set, having no higher motive than plunder and adventure. Each one was mounted on a mustang horse, and carried a rifle, a tomahawk, a bowie-knife, a pair of Colt’s revolvers, and a lasso for catching and throwing the horses of a flying enemy. Not valuing their own lives at a pin’s fee, they gave no quarter and expected none.

About eleven o’clock the breeze dropped and the sun came up with a dry, sultry scorch, like flame. Our spirits flagged, the stories ended, laughter and song died away; nor could we rouse to the least interest in a herdsman’s ranche--a mud-built hive, swarming with Mexican drones.

“What a weary land!” said Thalia.

“All lands are weary for women,” said her elder sister; and for a time nothing was heard but the harsh grinding of wheels in the gravelly sand.

In such emptiness it was a stirring event to be overtaken by a Pueblo Indian, who passed us with a swinging stride, rarely seen off the boards of a country theatre. This

“Wild warrior of the Turquois Hills”

is tame enough now. Always a tiller of the soil, he is the original, in fact, the aboriginal granger. A picturesque figure, in a handsome striped blanket, with red girth around his waist and a crown of green leaves, like the classic fillet, shading his forehead. We were fortunate, too, in seeing a half-grown boy chase jack-rabbits with a curved stick, hurling it with whirring sound, in the style of the boomerang, till lately thought exclusively Australian. The stripling appeared like the bird-hunter of the Nile, carved in _basso relievo_ on the oldest tomb at Thebes. Weapon and attitude of the Egyptian are precisely the same as those of the boyish red hunter of North America.

The more we learn of Eve’s family, the surer the proofs of a common parentage. Guided by the same instinct, the tools of various nations, unknown to each other, are the same and the measure of their advancement; showing how little depends on accident, and how closely they are connected with the organism, and, therefore, with the necessities of man. So striking is the parallel between aborigines in every continent that with difficulty do we divest ourselves of the idea that there must have been some direct intercommunication.

A band of tender green, restful to the sight, follows the course of a poor, tired, sluggish stream, sixteen miles from Santa Fé; and a mile or two down its soundless current we described a group of cotton-wood trees--an oasis, indeed--shading a low adobe house. The green leaves in restless flutter and the brook gave the spot an appearance of home not often found in the square of brown mud wall which makes the Mexican domicile.

Along the margin of the nameless stream is a border of alkali, sprinkled in patches like salt over the ground. Of course, we were struck with thirst at sight of running water; but prudently contented ourselves with that in our canteens, rather than risk drinking alkali, which abounds in New Mexico, so strong in some streams that fish cannot live in them. In many places the ranchero digs, to find only a mocking fluid, deadly alike to man, beast, and vegetation. And we comprehend the Arabian saying: “The water provider is always blest, being daily remembered in the prayers of the faithful.”

Our road was an easy descent all the way, the Cerillos being nearly 3,000 feet lower than Santa Fé. The founder of the antique city (Don Antonio de Espego) described this country with Spanish exuberance, in a letter to Philip Second: “The earth is filled with gold, silver, and turquoises.” And the gallant adventurer threw such glowing light upon it, the king at once sent a thousand men to colonize and possess the province.

As we quietly journeyed along, I pondered on the very moderate basis the heroic Cavaliers, those old Spanish filibusters, had for the brilliant reports sent back to Spain. Leaving the ambulance within a mile of the mines, we toiled wearily along the mountains, well named the Rocky. Their surface is strewn with fragments, broken as if chipped with hammers--a ragged pavement, which bruised our feet, tore our shoes, and wore out our patience; and when at last we reached the first mine, we thought it but a continuation of _Los Cerillos_. The most ancient is much the largest, and to this we directed our steps. Under the dizzy crags which overhang it is a sheltered recess, blackened with smoke and bedded with ashes made by camp-fires of Indians, who still frequent the spot, in search of the precious _chalchuite_. With difficulty we reached this cave, and, leaning over the edge, looked down and saw, not a narrow, black shaft, but half a mountain cut away. Undoubtedly, the mineral lay here which, through countless generations, furnished the Indian kings with their most valued ornaments. The yawning pit is two hundred feet deep and more than three hundred in diameter. Probably the work of aborigines before De Soto’s requiem mingled with the voice of the rushing waters of his burial place; when Columbus had seen the New World only in that vision of the night, where the unknown voice whispered: “God will cause thy name to be wonderfully resounded through the earth, and will give thee the keys of the gates of the Ocean, which are closed with strong chains.” On the walls of the great excavation Nature has gently, patiently done what she could to smooth the rugged crags, and has thrown out of their fissures a scant growth of shrubs, and trailed a scarlet blossom here and there on a thread-like stem. At the bottom, on stones crumbling with age, stained and weather-worn, are dwarf pines, the growth of the centuries. In this close amphitheatre there is no breeze to stir their tops, and their motionless foliage, with its somber shadows, adds to the ever-present mountain-gloom.

Thousands of tons of rock have been crushed from the solid mass, and thrown up in such a high heap it seems another mountain, overgrown with old pines and dry gray mosses. On a few fragments we noticed the turquois stain--“indication” of valuable mineral. When we consider that all this digging, hewing, and hacking were done by hand-labor alone, without knowledge of domestic animals, iron, or gunpowder, the _débris_ carried away in sacks of skins, the enormity of the work is the more impressive. The tradition is that the _chalchuite_ mines, through immemorial ages known to the primitive race, were possessed by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century. Indian slaves then worked them, under the lash of the conqueror, until 1680, when, by accident, a portion of the rock from which we had our first view fell, and killed thirty Pueblos. The Spaniards immediately made a requisition on the town of San Marcos for more natives to take their places; when, with a general uprising, they drove the hated oppressor from the country as far south as El Paso del Norte. I give the tale for what it is worth. Mining atmospheres are the favorite haunts of fable, and a spice of truth is enough to flavor whole volumes of stories, charming but delusive. An airy legend hovers about Santa Fé that two stones from “_La Canada de las Minas_”--“Glen of Mines”--are still among the crown jewels of Arragon. But _chalchuites_ were valueless after being once submitted to the jewelers of Spain; and the sparkling story, like many another told by the camp-fire, loses its original brightness when removed to the searching light of the student’s lamp.

Careful analysis shows the constituents of the _chalchuites_ are nearly the same as those of the Persian turquoises, and their formation the result of infiltration. Sometimes they are washed up by heavy rains; but usually are discovered by digging in the sandstone or are broken out from the body of the rock.

Not being disposed to dig, we retraced our path, and climbed around to the top of the shelving crag above us, and looked over the plateau. Eastwardly it stretches toward Santa Fé, beyond which the stony mountains lift their high heads. On the southwest it opens toward the Rio Grande in a measureless vista, where earth and sky appear to meet. A plain, oppressive in its vastness, lying in the midst of a stone wilderness, its sameness relieved by the solitary peaks, Sandia and Albuquerque. In every direction stand mountains grim and fixed as walls of adamant, apparently immovable as the throne of God. Low in the horizon one feathery cloud hung moveless in a sapphire sky. The world seemed stricken dead. No verdure to cool the parched grass; no water, “the eye of the earth” glancing up toward heaven; no waving branches, beckoning like friendly hands to cool shade and shelter: no wagon-road or foot-path to mark the track of men; not a sound to break a stillness which is not the hush of profound peace, but the everlasting silence of death.

Save the one shining spot of gauzy vapor, the blue above was without a blur. The sun was at meridian, and in its hard glitter the scorched summits looked like they were at white heat. The sea is lonely; but it has shifting color, sound, and motion. The silence of the land is deeper. If there had been the note of a bird, the hum of bees, even a grasshopper’s chirp, it had been a relief; but in the far-reaching desolation I alone drew breath. All else was still as the breast when the spirit has fled.

The influence was benumbing to the senses, and as I stood in infinite solitude, a stone among stones, there came over me the feeling that this melancholy waste is the skeleton of our Mother Earth; that the dust of which all flesh is made has been blown away, scattered to the four winds of heaven, leaving these gray old bones forlorn and unburied through the long, slow centuries, till the coming of the Great Day for which all other days were made.

The voices below were too remote for my hearing, and (how absurd it now appears) it was “company” to spy a speckled chameleon, sunning himself on a rock; and, as he quickly slipped between its cracks and vanished, I was left the more alone. Listening to silence, as it were, there swept across my memory the words of the hymn familiar in childhood as the dear face which bent above my cradle:

“O’er all these wide-extended plains Shines one eternal day.”

If the singer had ever faced the blinding glare of high noon on the wide-extended plains of the Rocky Mountains, he would have tuned his harp anew, and hymned the rivers of waters in a dry place, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

I soon sought that refuge from the desert scorch, and, snatching at shrubs to keep from slipping, scrambled down the mountain by a dizzy, winding way, the loosened stones rolling after me to the bottom of the mine. How pleasant the smoke of the camp-fire! Its leaping flame and crackle were a welcome back to life again. And never till then did I know how much sweeter than harp or horn the sound of human voices can be.

Long before I joined my companions I had heard shouts of exultation, and, wondering what prospector had “struck it,” I learned that a piece of _chalchuite_ had been brought out of the lining of a seam where it had lain under the roots of a stunted shrub, in appearance not unlike spicewood. It was near an inch in length, by half an inch in thickness; a large and lovely specimen, the color sea-green, delicately shaded into blue--the latter the result of decomposition, so the scientist said.

The owner of this “regular bonanza” was our driver. He made no effort to conceal his delight; and with reason, for it was a rare piece of mineral, and he a lucky miner to obtain it with so little trouble, or even to get it at all. Such a stone the gentle and gracious Montezuma might have worn in his signet-ring or set in the clasp of his green mantle of feather-work. Such a gift would have made still brighter the bright eyes of his daughter, the laughing Princess Nenetzin, the spoiled darling, whose death was the crowning horror of the _Noche Triste_.

I had sniffed coffee from afar, and now we were ready to pass the cup that not inebriates, sung by the temperate Cowper. Our cloth was laid on a table-rock, the feast was spread, we ate, drank, and were merry. The dumb spell of the desert snapt, only the peace of the perpetual hills remained. Resting in the fragrant shade of the pines, we talked of Montezuma, the saddest, proudest chief of Indian history, whose name is still a majestic memory among the degraded, broken-hearted Pueblos.

Beautiful beliefs they cherish regarding him--the peculiar friend of the red race, shadowy above all things, yet real above all things, who dwelt among them as a god, yet a familiar friend. He was the brother and equal of the Unseen One whose name it is death to utter; and the chiefs still watch for him at sunrise beside the sacred fire in the _estufa_, claiming his promise to come again from his throne in the sun, and bring back the faded glories of his fallen people. All their traditions point to the second advent of their beloved prophet, priest, and king, who disappeared from the earth when it was young, and who will not fail, in the fullness of time, to redeem the promise made to his red children.

The ground was strewn with fragments of broken pottery, the unfailing sign of the ancient Pueblo, the rightful owner of this soil. They were colored maroon red, light clay, and dark brown, with markings of black. At sight of them the antiquarian fell to wandering among tombs, discoursing on fallen kingdoms, extinct races, wrecks of empire, and columns voiceless as the gray stones of Pæstum. He was learned and eloquent; but none of these things move me. Our little scraps were but the elder and better counterparts of the poor potteries the Pueblos make at this day; and merely prove, what I believe has never been disputed, that North America has been inhabited from a remote period. I know there are enthusiasts who insist there was a prehistoric race, displaced by what we call aborigines, which had a civilization comparing favorably with those of the Old World. What that civilization was, let the stone hatchet, and the dingy pottery with its graceless tracings testify, when laid beside relics from Eturia the Beautiful. The Western fragments are in beggarly contrast with the exquisite vases and jewel-work which are the model and despair of the modern artist.

Several inferior bits of _chalchuite_ were dug out of the ancient wastage; but the color was faint, as if they had not lain long enough for a thorough dyeing. We added to our collection an arrowhead of jasper and one of obsidian, nicely flaked and pointed; and gave a dollar for the largest Indian hatchet I have ever seen, brought up by the enterprising Juan Fresco from an abandoned silver mine hard by. It was roughened and time-worn, and had lain there how long--ah! _Quien sabe?_

It may interest some believer in the perishing theory of “Ages” to know the Stone Age is not ended in New Mexico. Within the present generation, it is said, remote tribes have used as a weapon, offensive and defensive, the stone hatchet, tied by a thong of deer-skin to a wooden handle. As Sir John Herschel said of something else, this is one of those things which, according to received theories, ought not to happen.

We lingered under the solemn pines, groping with shadows, visible and unseen, loth to leave. The hoary hills, so lone and untrodden, began to be possessed of strange enchantment. The place was ours by right of discovery. We were a band of explorers, the first to break a silence lasting since the morning stars sang at creation’s dawn. Perhaps the witchery was a variation of the prevalent miner’s fever, for the day was waning when we reluctantly gave over our search for precious mineral.

In the shining of the loveliest afterglow this side of Heaven, we sought the wagon, standing in the level expanse, like a ship at anchor. A freshening breeze blew cheerily, and, turning back as we drove away, we watched the swift-coming Night gather the mountains tenderly, one by one, into her bosom, and touch their scarred, stern faces with ineffable beauty.