Charles Fletcher Lummis

“ It is a terrific trough 6,000 to 7,000 fect deep, ten to twenty miles wide, hundreds of miles long, peopled with hundreds of peaks taller than any mountain east of the Rockies, yet not one of them with its head so high as your feet, and all ablaze with such color as no eastern or European landscape ever knew, even in the Alpen-glow. And as you sit upon the brink the divine scene-shifters give you a new canyon every hour. With each degree of the sun’s course the great countersunk mountains we have been watching fade away, and new ones, as terrific, are carved by the westering shadows. ”

“ Its heart was turquoise and its eyes red garnets.
“Take it, son, and fear not,” said the aged conjurer, “for it is stronger than the ghosts. But now go and hunt, for there is no more meat.”
When Pablo toiled up the hill of ruins at sundown a noble antelope was balanced upon his shoulders and a fat wild turkey dangled from his belt. He threw them down proudly, and was paid with a shy glance from the eyes that now lived in his heart, and the old man said:
“The new wahr is good! And thou art a hunter like Keem-eé-deh himself. Verily there will be no lack of meat in thy house.” ”

“ So lived and so died the man who began life as the swineherd of Truxillo, and who ended it the conqueror of Peru. He was the greatest of the Pioneers; a man who from meaner beginnings rose higher than any; a man much slandered and maligned by the prejudiced; but nevertheless a man whom history will place in one of her highest niches,—a hero whom every lover of heroism will one day delight to honor.
Such was the conquest of Peru. Of the romantic history which followed in Peru I cannot tell here,—of the lamentable fall of brave Gonzalo Pizarro ”

“ Suddenly the brown llama turned with a snort of disgust, and strode off up the trail. The white one hesitated a moment, snorted, and followed. “That way they get tired, sirs,” said the boy, emptying his hat and pulling it down upon his thatch of black hair.
“I’d take a good club to them!” growled Barton, who had great confidence in the Saxon way of forcing things.
“No, the boy is quite right. It is another case wherein you must not try to be smarter than nature. The llama is the stubbornest brute alive—a mule is vacillating compared to him. ”

“ How much longer this accursed power tormented the miserable monarch the myth does not tell us; but he was cured at last by bathing in the river Pactolus, and the washing away of his magic power filled the sands of the stream with golden grains.
The Midases are not dead yet—for the one of ancient fable there are thousands to-day, at whose very touch all turns to gold. Their food does not become metal between their lips—but often it might as well, for all the joy they have of it. ”

“ Columbus did little beyond finding America, which was indeed glory enough for one life. But of the gallant nation which made possible his discovery there were not lacking heroes to carry out the work which that discovery opened. It was a century before Anglo-Saxons seemed to waken enough to learn that there really was a New World, and into that century the flower of Spain crowded marvels of achievement. She was the only European nation that did not drowse. Her mailed explorers overran Mexico and Peru, grasped their incalculable riches, and made those kingdoms inalienable parts of Spain. ”

“ All these, and a great deal more, make the Southwest a wonderland without a parallel, There are ruins as striking as the storied ones along the Rhine, and far more remarkable, There are peoples as picturesque as any in the Orient, and as romantic as the Aztecs and the Incas of whom we have learned such gilded fables, and there are natural wonders which have no peers whatever. ”

“ Pablo fished out the little stone image, which he had never shown to man before, and T’bó-deh inhaled from its lips.
“It is so!” he said angrily; and prying out the turquoise heart he showed the hunter that from beneath it the sacred meal was gone, and in its place a tiny black feather. “It is no wonder that thy hunting was ill,” he cried, “for the witches have changed the heart of Keem-eé-deh! But I will give thee a strong wahr that none can kill,” and breaking the polluted image with a rock, he covered the fragments with a cloth and chanted a sacred song. ”

“ The wilderness they conquered was savage enough, truly, but fertile, well wooded, well watered, and full of game; while that which the Spaniards tamed was such a frightful desert as no human conquest ever overran before or since, and peopled by a host of savage tribes to some of whom the petty warriors of King Philip were no more to be compared than a fox to a panther. The Apaches and the Araucanians would perhaps have been no more than other Indians had they been transferred to Massachusetts; but in their own grim domains they were the deadliest savages that Europeans ever encountered. ”

“ The least of the difficulties which beset the finders of the New World was the then tremendous voyage to reach it. Had that three thousand miles of unknown sea been the chief obstacle, civilization would have overstepped it centuries before it did. It was human ignorance deeper than the Atlantic, and bigotry stormier than its waves, which walled the western horizon of Europe for so long. But for that, Columbus himself would have found America ten years sooner than he did; and for that matter, America would not have waited for Columbus's five-times-great-grandfather to be born. ”

“ But now the face seemed not quite so heavy; for again he was looking toward the pueblo and bending his head as one who listens for a far whisper. There it came again—a faint, faint air which not one of us could have heard, but to this Indian boy it told of shouts and mingled wails.
“What will be?” cried Lelo, stamping his hoe upon the barrier, and with unwonted fire in his eyes. “For surely I hear the voice of women lamenting, and there are men’s shouts as in anger. Something heavy it will be—and perhaps I am needed.” ”

“ Many of the Spaniards perished by these grim, strange foes; some were crushed to pulp in the mighty coils of the snakes, and some were crunched between the teeth of the scaly saurians. Many more fell victims to lurking savages; in a single swoop fourteen of the dwindling band were slain by Indians, who surrounded their stranded canoe. Food gave out too, and the survivors were starving when Ruiz got back with a scant relief but cheering news. Very soon too Almagro arrived, with supplies and a reinforcement of eighty men. ”

“ A Duel in the Desert.
Of the innumerable tragedies of the wilderness—the grim procession of life and death, the irreconcilable conflict of the animals as bounden as we are to appetite and passion and self-preservation—probably every hunter of considerable experience has seen the eloquent tokens; and every reader has heard at least of the sensational cases. The wonder is, perhaps, that these latter are so few; that only one death out of a million is so far outside the vast inclusive rule as to be of interest to us dull-eyed observers. For the law of conflict is inexorable. ”

“ Some of the most valuable explorations have been made by men who had no more idea of being explorers than they had of inventing a railroad to the moon; and it is a striking fact that the first inland exploration of America, and the two most wonderful journeys in it, were not only accidents, but the crowning misfortunes and disappointments of the men who had hoped for very different things.
Exploration, intended or involuntary, has not only achieved great results for civilization, but in the doing has scored some of the highest feats of human heroism. ”

“ A prowling wildcat (evidently too hungry to be fanciful) finds a great horned owl blinking upon the brink of a cliff, and pounces upon it, catching a wing hold. The owl, somewhat armored, even against those terrible teeth and claws, by its quilting of feathers, flings itself upon its back; pounding fiercely with its free wing, tearing with its hooked beak, and clenching its talons into the flesh with that peculiar mechanical lock-grip of its kind—a grip which death does not loosen, as more than one hunter who picked an owl up unripe has learned to his sorrow. ”

“ In the supreme moment all the crowding, jumbled thoughts of the full brain seem to be suddenly swept aside, to leave a clear space down which the one great thought may leap forward like the runner to his goal,—or like the lightning which splits the slow, tame air asunder even as its fire dashes on its way. Most intelligent persons have that mental lightning sometimes; and when it can be relied on to come and instantly illumine the [Pg 251] darkest crisis, it is the insight of genius. It was that which made Napoleon, Napoleon; and made Pizarro, Pizarro. ”

“ In went the brown fist again; and rummaging down through the silken fleece, his fingers met something firmer. In a moment he had it out—a long bundle of that matchless weaving of old Peru; of cloth as soft and strong as silk, woven with strange figures of men and gods and beasts; such fabrics as never unthinking loom has woven, nor any machine less wondrous than the fingers of a man.
“Ay! It will be worth twenty soles!” cried Faquo softly. “But it is so heavy! Perhaps they have wound it on a stone.” ”

“ We have not been taught how astonishing it was that one nation should have earned such an overwhelming share in the honor of giving us America; and yet when we look into the matter, it is a very startling thing. There was a great Old World, full of civilization: suddenly a New World was found,—the most important and surprising discovery in the whole annals of mankind. ”

“ Take the heart of a man, and go!”
Pablo looked at the pitiful little heap in the corner, and turning, manfully strode out through the broad portal and went stumbling westward in the darkness, over mounds and hollows and fallen walls. Down the long, steep ridge, across the undulant plain, knee-deep in dry and whispering grass, and up the western slope of the valley he trudged; and at last in the darkness ran up against a smooth, straight face of rock. “It is the cliff,” he shivered—for he feared greatly. ”

“ The only one who remembers much of that grim journey is Ramon, and as he is [60] not much given to talking, no one knows just what he does think of it. The Professor’s clear recollection begins with finding himself on board the train at Casapalca—a train of that most wonderful railroad in the world, the railroad above the clouds, that clambers up and burrows through the cordillera of Peru. Before that are only hazy memories of a vast mountain wall leaning over to crush him; a winding path in the air; a queer, boy’s voice, coming from nowhere, with little Spanish words of cheer. ”

“ For the historian nowadays to look upon that Norse discovery as a myth, or less than a certainty, is to confess that he has never read the Sagas. The Norsemen came, and even camped in the New World, before the year 1000; but they only camped. They built no towns, and practically added to the world's knowledge nothing at all. They did nothing to entitle them to credit as pioneers. The honor of giving America to the world belongs to Spain,—the credit not only of discovery, but of centuries of such pioneering as no other nation ever paralleled in any land. ”

“ From wandering, naked, starving, despised beggars, and slaves to brutal savages, they suddenly became personages of note,—still paupers and sufferers, as were all their patients, but paupers of mighty power. There is no fairy tale more romantic than the career thenceforth of these poor, brave men walking painfully across a continent as masters and benefactors of all that host of wild people.
Trudging on from tribe to tribe, painfully and slowly the white medicine-men crossed Texas and came close to our present New Mexico. ”

“ And when both had proved themselves by eating the last grain, the elders took them out to the sacred running-place and put them side by side, and marked the course, and gave them the road. Then Pablo went running like a strong antelope, but the girl like a scared fawn; and up the sacred hill they flew, and turned at the Stone of the Bell, and came flying back. But now Pablo was slower, for it is not well to surpass one’s bride in the marrying race, as if one would rob her of respect; and if they come in equal, there is no marriage. ”

“ Then came the last century, a dismal hundred years of ceaseless harassment by the Apaches, Navajos, and Comanches, and occasionally by the Utes,—a harassment which had hardly ceased a decade ago. The Indian wars were so constant, the explorations (like that wonderful attempt to open a road from San Antonio de Bejar, Texas, to Monterey, California) so innumerable, that their individual heroism is lost in their own bewildering multitude.
More than two centuries ago the Spaniards explored Texas, and settlement soon followed. ”

“ I never knew him to fry eggs in a stove-pipe hat, nor to pick twenty-dollar gold pieces out of people’s eyes, nor to chop off a man’s head and then stick it on again, nor any of those threadbare sensations, though he sometimes practices simple illusions like making things appear where they are not, or causing them to seem not to be where you really know they are. But those are trifles, just to keep his hand in; his claim as champion conjurer of the world rests on very different accomplishments. ”

“ You see Pizarro always took the heaviest and hardest burden for himself, and gave the easiest to his associate. It was always Almagro who was sent back to the comforts of civilization, while his lion-hearted leader bore the waiting and danger and suffering. The greatest obstacle all along now was in the soldiers themselves,—and I say this with a full realization of the deadly perils and enormous hardships. But perils and hardships without are to be borne more easily than treachery and discontent within. At every step Pizarro had to carry his men,—morally. ”

“ Only, a few rods farther to the left, and where Lelo could not see for the wall at his back, the tall, white ears of a burro were moving quietly along in the bushes, which hid the rest of its body. Now and then the animal stopped and cocked up its ears, as if to listen; and its eyes rose over the bush, shining with a deep, strange light. Just beyond was the low adobe wall which separated Reyes’s garden from the next—running from the foot of the cliff down past the old house.
To go on to the field needed even more courage than to keep from fleeing for home ”

“ Broadly speaking, all the enterprise of Europe was confined to one nation,—and that a nation by no means the richest or strongest. One nation practically had the glory of discovering and exploring America, of changing the whole world's ideas of geography, and making over knowledge and business all to herself for a century and a half. And Spain was that nation. ”

“ Pablo unrolled the bundle from his head, wriggled, wet-skinned, into the red print shirt and snowy calzoncillos, wrapped their flapping folds about his calf with the buckskin leggings of rich maroon; belted these at either knee with a wee, gay sash from the looms of Moqui, fastened the moccasins with their silver buttons, and, with the tawny sheath of bow and arrows slung across his back, started at a swift walk. Once only he stopped, after a scramble up the gravel hills that scalloped the plateau, to look back a moment. ”

“ When his men had sufficiently recovered from their wounds Vicente de Zaldivar, the leader of probably the most wonderful capture in history, marched victorious back to San Gabriel de los Españoles, taking with him eighty young Acoma girls, whom he sent to be educated by the nuns in Old Mexico. What a shout must have gone up from the gray walls of the little colony when its anxious watchers saw at last the wan and unexpected tatters of its little army pricking slowly homeward across the snows on jaded steeds! ”