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With his field-glass, Thurstane examined one after another of the mesas and buttes which diversified this enormous depression. At last his attention settled on an isolated bluff or mound, with a flattened surface three or four miles in length, the whole mass of which seemed to be solid and barren rock.
The Apaches were raiding throughout the southeastern part of the territory and the little town of adobes was getting new reports of murders from that section every day. They drove their mules on eastward up the long mesas leading to the San Pedro Divide. At the Pantano stage station they saw the fresh scars of Apache bullets on the adobe walls.
The professor, as well as being on a vacation, was in a sense on a mission, for he bore with him the commission of a well-known institute of science in the East to investigate some of the mesas of this part of the world, and also to procure relics and trophies of the vanished race that once inhabited them, and accurate measurements of the strange formations.
Far to the east, where the mesas sloped gently to the hills, grazed the sheep, some twenty bands of a thousand each, and each band guarded and cared for by a herder and an assistant who cooked and at times journeyed with the lazy burros to and from the hacienda for supplies and provisions.
One moment they were looking at the wonderful mesas and superb canyons; the next they seemed to pass through dry gullies and great shallow basins. Then there would come long, weary levels of sand that gleamed in the sun; and far away she would behold tremendous buttes. The valleys they passed through were verdant and lovely. Cattle grazed here in a calm peace.
In the soft morning light the red mesas, the yellow walls, the black domes were less harsh than in the full noonday sun, purer than in the tender shadow of twilight. Below me were slopes and slides divided by ravines full of stones as large as houses, with here and there a lonesome leaning crag, giving irresistible proof of the downward trend, of the rolling, weathering ruins of the rim.
And no wonder these dun-colored villages seem so perfectly a part of the mesas themselves, for they are literally so their rock walls and dirt roofs having been merely picked up from the floor and sides of the mesa itself and made into human habitations. The Hopi number about 2,500 and are a Shoshonean stock.
In the distance gradually there appeared dim mesas like great fingers stretching out against the sky; miles away they seemed, and nothing intervening but a stretch of varying color where sage-brush melted into sand, and sage-brush and greasewood grew again, with tall cactus startling here and there like bayonets at rest but bristling with menace. The Indian had grown silent and sullen.
Rhoda turned from staring at the distant mesas and eyed the young Indian wonderingly. "Why!" she exclaimed, "I hate it! You know that sick fear that gets you when you try to picture eternity to yourself? That's the way this barrenness and awful distance affects me. I hate it!" "But you won't hate it!" cried Cartwell. "You must let me show you its bigness. It's as healing as the hand of God."
It is interesting to note that in the abandonment of villages the same law appears to have prevailed here as in the other Tusayan mesas, for in the shrinkage of the Hopi people they concentrated more and more to the points of the mesas. Thus, at East Mesa, Sikyatki, Kachinba, and Küküchomo were destroyed, while Walpi remained.
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