Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/232

218 and cliffs rising perpendicularly 5000 feet above the river. The chain of the Manzano, less steep but treeless, is still 2000 feet higher. The river valley itself, seldom more than two miles wide, passes in summer like a green band among the dunes, which are then tinged with green, but in winter the fields are barren and the trees are leafless, and stand on the heights like white skeletons on a vast, bare waste.

When it is stormy on the Rio Grande, the dark-blue sky and the dazzling light vanish, the clouds sink low down to the foot of the high mountain range, and it is gloomy, cold, and oppressive. Sand whirls chase one another along the stream, break up and dash whistling upon the gravel hills. Dust and sand add to the darkness of the atmosphere, and one is relieved to see the snow begin to fall thick and then thicker, while the roaring of the wind is lulled to a mournful sigh. When the snow has ceased and the clouds have disappeared from the slopes of the mountain, a thin white sheet covers the ground, which at night glows in the starlight with phosphorescence. The snow does not stay long, for the sandy ground soon absorbs all moisture.

This sandy soil in the Valley of the Rio Grande is fruitful, extraordinarily productive. When it can be watered it rewards, and that always bountifully, even the feeble efforts which Indian agriculture puts forth. No doubt the Spaniards were not specially attracted by the view of an agriculture which did not, with more labor and in a more difficult because colder climate, afford them all the products of the tropical climate they had left, and into which they would have to introduce the grains and fruits of the