SPYING OUT THE LAND


City of the Holy Faith,
In thy streets so dim with age,
Do I read not Faith's decay,
But the Future's heritage.
--LILIAN WHITING.


Day was passing and the shadows were already beginning to grow purple in
the valleys, long before the golden light had left the opal-crowned
peaks of the Sangre-de-Christo Mountains beyond them.

On the wide crest of a rocky ridge our wagons halted. Behind us the long
trail stretched back, past mountain height and cañon wall, past barren
slope and rolling green prairie, on to where the wooded ravines hem in
the Missouri's yellow floods.

Before us lay a level plain, edged round with high mesas, over which
snowy-topped mountain peaks kept watch. A sandy plain, checkered across
by verdant-banded arroyos, and splotched with little clumps of trees and
little fields of corn. In the heart of it all was Santa Fé, a mere group
of dust-brown adobe blocks--silent, unsmiling, expressionless--the
city of the Spanish Mexican, centuries old and centuries primitive.

As our tired mules slackened their traces and drooped to rest after the
long up-climb, Esmond Clarenden called out: