Estufa

“ In the centre of the angle there was a deep excavation, doubtless an underground chamber for religious services, known as an Estufa. Major Powell considers these remains the work of a branch of the people now occupying the province of Tusayan in northern Arizona. These Moqui peoples will be noticed farther on. In the neighborhood of the last-named ruin, the Major found a tall, pyramidal work of nature, formed by smooth rock-mounds, rising one above another. On climbing this he observed that this natural eminence had been used as an outlook by the people of the Pueblo. ”

“ The houses belong to the women, the estufas to the men. If a man repudiates his woman, he has to go to the estufa. It is forbidden for women to sleep in the estufas, or to enter these for any purpose except to give their husbands or sons something to eat. The men spin and weave. The women bring up the children and prepare the food. The country is so fertile that they do not have to break up the ground the year round, but only have to sow the seed, which is presently covered by the fall of snow, and the ears come up under the snow. ”

“ The outer rooms only seem to be used for dwellings, and are lighted by little windows at the sides, but are entered through trap-doors in the azoteas or roofs. Most of the inner apartments are employed as granaries and storerooms, but a spacious hall in the centre of the mass, known as the estufa, is reserved for their secret councils. ”

“ It is of stone, mostly of blocks about five inches square, and laid in courses, with considerable regularity. The work is equal to the best masonry in the edifice. In the open court, and near the outer structure, bounding it in front, is another estufa of great size, sixty-three and a half feet in diameter. These estufas, which are used as places of council, and for the performance of their religious rites, are still found at all the present occupied pueblos in New Mexico. There are six at Taos, three at each house, and they are partly sunk in the ground by an excavation. ”

“ Not only were the estufas or kivas used for clan and pueblo councils and for the education of the boys, but nearly all the early Spanish chroniclers write as if the men used them also as a sort of club-house where they could keep warm on cold winter days. Coronado speaks of “very good rooms underground and paved at Granada (or Háwikuh) which are made for winter and are something like hot baths,” and again “places where the men gather for consultation. The young men live in the estufas, which are underground, square or round.” ”

“ Such survivals are common in all arts, and instances of it are so common in architecture that no examples need be cited. Only one of these survivals has been found in pueblo architecture, but that one is very instructive; it is the presence of circular chambers in groups of rectangular rooms, which occur in certain regions. These chambers 193 are called estufas or kivas and are the council houses and temples of the people, in which the governmental and religious affairs of the tribe are transacted. ”

“ He described them exactly as Mr. Walters had, and as I had found the pit in mound V, and described the position of the skeleton also as if sitting with the face to the east. We soon came to a walled ruin 6 m. × 6 m. or 20 ft. × 20 ft., the walls composed of sandstone,—a range of rubble blocks very much ruined,—a piñon having a diameter of 0.45 m.—18 in.—shooting up from the interior. 50 m.—165 ft.—further north a clearly defined estufa is seen, 4 m.—13 ft.—across, with stone walls 1 m.—3 ft. 3 in.—in width. The apron of the mesa is overgrown with fine pines. ”

“ The estufas belong to the whole village. It is a sacrilege for the women to go into the estufas to sleep. [29] They make the cross as a sign of peace. They burn their dead, and throw the implements used in their work into the fire with the bodies. [30]
It is 20 leagues to Tusayan going northwest. This is a province with seven villages, of the same sort, dress, habits, and ceremonies as at Cibola. There may be as many as 3,000 or 4,000 men in the fourteen villages of these two provinces. It is 40 leagues or more to Tiguex, the road trending toward the north. ”

“ The breakage and loss on the liquors is very much reduced, which is sometimes excessive in the estufas, by the falling to pieces of the heated and dried-up casks. Sixth. No bad taste is imparted to the liquors during my process, which is too often the case in the estufas, where the wine receives the heat through the sides of the cask. To enable others skilled in the art to make use of my improvement, I will proceed to describe my process and its operation. I use casks or tanks (as the case may be) for holding the wine; if casks, they may be placed on end. ”

“ The houses have flat roofs and walls of stone and mud, and this was where they killed Steve (Estebanillo) , the negro who had come with Dorantes from Florida and returned with Friar Marcos de Niza. In this province of Cibola there are five little villages besides this, all with flat roofs and of stone and mud, as I said. The country is cold, as is shown by their houses and hothouses (estufas) . They have food enough for themselves, of corn and beans and melons. These villages are about a league or more apart from each other, within a circuit of perhaps 6 leagues. ”

“ In these subterranean temples the old men met in secret council, or assembled in worship of their gods. Here are held dances and festivities, social intercourse, and mourning ceremonies. Certain of the Pueblos have a custom similar to that practiced by some of the northern tribes, the men sleeping in the sweat-house with their feet to the fire, and permitting women to enter only to bring them food. The estufas of Tiguex were situated in the heart of the village, built underground, both round and square, and paved with large polished stones. ”

“ With such a subaltern, what might not he, Father Esteban, accomplish! Looking further into the future, what a glorious successor might be left to his unfinished work on Todos Santos!
Buried in these reflections, Padre Esteban sauntered leisurely up the garden, that gradually ascended the slight elevation on which the greater part of the pueblo was built. Through a low gateway in the wall he passed on to the crest of the one straggling street of Todos Santos. ”

“ We became convinced of how useless was the attempt to explore any farther the source of the Ostuta, and taking additional barometrical observations, and cross-sectioning the river at the highest point visited, we turned back extremely disappointed.
The Ostuta delivers at the highest point 84 feet less than at Piedra Grande, or 119 cubic feet per second.
On the mountains north of Niltepec, the southern slopes are of clay; as we ascend we meet sandstone, compact limestone, and lastly gray and green slate, breccia, and porphyry. ”

“ San Estevan is a pretty village, near the summit of some low gray hills of tufa, behind which rises a background of higher hills of the same material. The slope is terraced for the houses, which are all built of adobe bricks and have flat roofs. The "three part house," of the ancient Aztec type—god-house, kitchen, and granary—is better shown in this state than almost any other part of the Republic. ”

“ He turned to the harbor far below, with its fleet of sailing-ships resting like a flock of gulls upon a sea of quicksilver. Beyond the bay, twenty miles distant, a range of hazy mountains hid the horizon. Facing to the south, Esteban looked up the full length of the valley of the San Juan, clear to the majestic Pan de Matanzas, a wonderful sight indeed; then his eyes returned, as they always did, to the Yumuri, Valley of Delight. "Paradise indeed!" he muttered. "I gave her everything. She gained nothing by dying." ”

“ In dread of the thousand nameless terrors of the tropics, they hasten to Panama, eat one breakfast of eggs in their omelet stage of existence, and are off up the coast in the steamer.
From the moment of their arrival at Aspinwall an Isthmus fever floats before them, tangibly in the air. It bangs a yellow veil before every object. Their sight is jaundiced. They hurry over a railroad, laid, as they have been told, on human sleepers. The rich luxuriance of the forest along its course, now first opened to the eye of man, seems only rank, unwholesome vegetation. ”

“ The hermit who first discovered the spot where the monastery of San Estevan now stands must have been a lover of nature, of trees, of birds—an artist; the saint who first elected to dwell among the bare granite rocks of Osera must have sought unrestrained liberty for the eye and the foot, rather than a leafy nest, and have eschewed not only his fellow-man but nature as well. ”

“ Passing the ruined church and the old village, we rode over a rich valley so well cultivated with Indian corn that it gave a key to the boy's question. Whether we had come to Chiquimula to buy maize? At a league's distance we came to the village of San Estevan, where, amid a miserable collection of thatched huts, stood a gigantic church, like that at Chiquimula, roofless, and falling to ruins. ”

“ One of the Indian stories of Estevan's death is that their wise men took the negro out of the pueblo during the night, and "gave him a powerful kick, which sped him through the air back to the south, whence he came!" The killing of Estevan made it impossible for Friar Marcos, alone and unprepared for fighting, to enter the Cibola region. The first reports of the disaster, as is usually the custom, told of the death of all who accompanied the negro, and in consequence there was much wailing among the Indians who had followed the friar. ”

“ The isthmus emerged from a wild and terrible coast-line, into whose bowels the ravenous sea had bored strange caverns, resonant with perpetual roar of tortured billows. At one spot in this wilderness the ocean had penetrated the wall of rock for two hundred feet, and in stormy weather the salt spray rose through a perpendicular shaft more than five hundred feet deep. This place was called the Devil's Blow-hole. The upper drop of the earring was named Forrestier's Peninsula, and was joined to the mainland by another isthmus called East Bay Neck. ”

“ This entrance, however, is so small that notwithstanding the efforts of laborers who were employed by the explorer to clear the fallen rubbish and open a path, they were unable to penetrate the whole of the interior chambers. The short time they were enabled to devote to this work, and the fear of the Indians to encounter wild beasts and serpents in the interior of the temple, deterred Señor Esteva from further efforts, and thus, perhaps, one of the most perfect remains of antiquity on the east coast of Mexico is still very inadequately described. ”

“ An old soldier in the wars of Queen Anne, a native of the place, settled there when her wars were over, and, as was customary with old soldiers, set up an inn near the bridge, at the cross roads. He had been quartered at Estepona, in the south of Spain, and thence he had brought a Spanish wife. Partly in honour of her, chiefly in reminiscence of his old military days, he entitled his inn, "The Estepona Tavern." The Spanish name in English mouths became rapidly transformed into Stewponey. ”

“ Manilba is distant about seven miles from Estepona. The first part of the road thither lies through productive vineyards; the latter along the sea-shore, on reaching which it falls into the road from Gibraltar to Malaga.
Not many years since Estepona was a mere fishing village, built under the protection of one of the casa fuertes that guard the coast; but the fort stands now in the midst of a thriving town, containing 6000 inhabitants. ”

“ The agreeableness of the Isthmian climate as a whole and in various localities, if to some extent indicated by figures, is largely a matter of individual temperament. With little difference in temperature Colon has double the rainfall of Panama with a corresponding excess of humidity. Yet happily for the welfare of the great work and the workers, it has been the fashion on the Isthmus for every one to have local pride ”

“ From the wall of the basin with terrific force and in huge volume, carbon dioxide pours forth and not only keeps the water in continual undulation, but softens and crushes the clayey slate that constitutes the wall of the basin and turns its colour to an ashen grey. ”

“ At daylight we started, and arrived at Istapa at nine o'clock. Captain de Nouvelle had not yet gone on board. Two French ships were then lying off the port: the Belle Poule and the Melanie, both from Bordeaux, the latter being the vessel of Captain de Nouvelle. He had accounts to arrange with the captain of the Belle Poule, and we started first for his vessel.
As I have before said, Istapa is an open roadstead, without bay, headland, rock, reef, or any protection whatever from the open sea. Generally the sea is, as its name imports, pacific, and the waves roll calmly to the shore ”

“ They inhabit a valley shut out from the winds of the north by a high ridge of hills, and open to the sultry heat of the south; while the pestilential effluvia arising from the vegetable decomposition of the marsh, the suffocating smoke of brick and tile kilns, and the metallic vapours of the silver foundery, form the atmosphere they breathe. Their own habits are singularly dirty, and the streets are filled with putrid water stagnating into offensive pools, without any current of air to disperse the foul accumulation of gases in the atmosphere. ”

“ Through the heated atmosphere the lately-fallen rain is rising in vapour, and within its misty shroud it envelopes not only the lake, but the plain around its edges. It rolls over the line of savage watchers, on up between the jaws of the chine, till in its damp clammy film it embraces the bodies of those who are waiting above.
“Now’s your time, muchachos!” says Don Estevan, addressing himself to those who are to adventure. “There could not be a better opportunity; if they can’t be passed now, they never can.” ”