The Days of a Man 



1:1898 



Wise con- 

 cessions 



The house 

 a fortress 



and its people restored to the Catholic fold. Mean- 

 while, in view of reluctant conversion, the priests 

 wisely and by tacit consent allowed their charges 

 to retain enough of pagan customs to bind together 

 the old and the new. 



The houses, substantially built of stones held 

 together by clay cement, constitute three long 

 blocks, each a thousand feet in length and cut by 

 partitions into separate homes without interior 

 communication. At the front, facing a rude street, 

 the lowest and widest of the two or three receding 

 stories of which each unit is made had in former 

 times neither window nor door, entrance being in- 

 variably by means of a ladder drawn up at night. 

 From the vantage point of the flat terraces intruders 

 could be easily detected and fought off, and the 

 dwellings as a whole form what is essentially a 

 great communal fortress, the forbidding rear wall 

 of which rises sheer and unbroken to the roof. 

 Translucent gypsum (selenlte) made passable win-- 

 dows before glass became available, and the living; 

 rooms have tiny corner fireplaces to furnish a degree 

 of warmth. It will thus be seen that the Pueblo 

 folk had of themselves reached a respectable level 

 of orderly living long before they learned to use an 

 iron cook stove. They are, if anything, over-clothed, 

 especially the women, who wear expensive but 

 modest and quaintly attractive dress; and in gen- 

 eral intelligence, as well as in moral stamina, they 

 rank high. 



The large and picturesque Acoma church stands 

 on the eastern edge of the mesa. In front is the 

 crowded cemetery, a huge stone box nearly 200 feet 

 square and 40 feet deep at the edge, which it took 



C 628 3 



