He is brave, honest and enterprising within the fixed limits of his little sphere; his wife is virtuous, his children are docile.  And were the whole earth swept bare of every living thing, save for a few leagues surrounding his tribal home, his life would show no manner of disturbance.  Probably he might never hear of so unimportant an event.  He would still alternately labor and relax in festive games, still reverence his gods and rear his children to a life of industry and content, so anomalous is he, so firmly established in an absolute independence.

Pueblo architecture possesses none of the elaborate ornamentation found in the Aztec ruins in Mexico.  The exterior of the house is absolutely plain.  It is sometimes seven stories in height and contains over a thousand rooms.  In some instances it is built of adobe—­blocks of mud mixed with straw and dried in the sun, and in others, of stone covered with mud cement.  The entrance is by means of a ladder, and when that is pulled up the latch-string is considered withdrawn.

The pueblo of pueblos is Acoma, a city without a peer.  It is built upon the summit of a table-rock, with overhanging, eroded sides, 350 feet above the plain, which is 7,000 feet above the sea.  Anciently, according to the traditions of the Queres, it stood upon the crest of the superb Haunted Mesa, three miles away, and some 300 feet higher, but its only approach was one day destroyed by the falling of a cliff, and three unhappy women, who chanced to be the only occupants—­the remainder of the population being at work in the fields below—­died of starvation, in view of the homeless hundreds of their people who for many days surrounded the unscalable mesa with upturned, agonized faces.

The present Acoma is the one discovered by the Spaniards; the original pueblo on the Mesa Encantada being even then an ancient tradition.  It is 1,000 feet in length and 40 feet high, and there is, besides, a church of enormous proportions.  Until lately, it was reached only by a precipitous stairway in the rock, up which the inhabitants carried upon their backs every particle of the materials of which the village is constructed.  The graveyard consumed forty years in building, by reason of the necessity of bringing earth from the plain below; and the church must have cost the labor of many generations, for its walls are 60 feet high and 10 feet thick, and it has timbers 40 feet long and 14 inches square.

The Acomas welcomed the soldiers of Coronado with deference, ascribing to them celestial origin.  Subsequently, upon learning the distinctly human character of the Spaniards, they professed allegiance, but afterwards wantonly slew a dozen of Zaldibar’s men.  By way of reprisal, Zaldibar headed three-score soldiers and undertook to carry the sky-citadel by assault.  The incident has no parallel in American history, short of the memorable and similar exploit of Cortez on the great Aztec pyramid.