Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/217

Rh whence the view down into the yawning depth is awful. The six hundred inhabitants draw their supply of water the year round from the accumulations of rain and snow in two deep natural cisterns. The cultivated fields are fourteen miles away.

I hope I may be pardoned if I repeat here a few impressions which were deeply marked upon me during a long sojourn in Acoma, and in words which I have already published in "A Letter from Acoma" in the German journal Das Ausland (1884, No. XIII.). These impressions have been renewed on two visits to the place, when the same feelings were daily awakened.

"When the visitor stands upon the rocks which immediately surround the water-pool, he looks down from them into the valley upon the great mesas that surround them, and beyond these upon the massive pyramid of Mount Taylor, or the Sierra de San Matéo. ... As evening approaches the shadows lie deep upon the ground, and as they climb up the rockwalls, as cliff after cliff is swallowed up in darkness, his heart is oppressed with the feeling that all intercourse with the outer world is henceforth cut off. This feeling has crept upon me every evening at sunset; for escape from Acoma in the night would be impossible to any one who had not lived there a long time. When the last ray of the sun has taken leave of the lofty sierra, one feels absolutely alone, forsaken, helplessly floating in the darkness of night. But this feeling soon passes away; for a clear, although monotonous, singing sounds from the pueblo, fires blaze on the roofs, and when one has returned to the houses laughing voices greet him, and joyous