Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour

Though the cover features a katchina
dancer, they never really come up in the
book. I've read that the katchina cult,
which seems strongest among the modern
Hopi, is something of an innovation. At
any rate, it has its own complicated and
little-known history.

I just did something I thought I'd never do: I read a Louis L'Amour novel.

Louis L'Amour, if you don't know, is arguably the all-time most popular writer of westerns. He wrote 89 novels in all, a number of which were turned into films and television shows. His presence, though increasingly tattered and faded, was inescapable for someone growing up in Texas in the eighties and nineties, which I did. But I've had an aversion to westerns as long as I can remember, and I was never tempted to crack open one of the zillions of L'Amour paperbacks underfoot back then.

(Perhaps my aversion dates from the time we got free 3D movie glasses from the county courthouse to watch a 3D John Wayne movie on the local UHF station. I think it was Hondo, which is based on a L'Amour story. Our county seat happened to be called Hondo as well...! Anyway, I remember looking over at my family, all gaping at the TV screen with big grins on their faces, and silently removing my own glasses, content to watch the movie in overlapping red-and-blue, which gave me a headache. But did I really need John Wayne's horse's nose popping out of the screen at me?)

Anyway, recent events have conspired to soften my old contempt, the primary one being my ill-considered decision to begin writing "Weird Westerns" myself. So I'd already been toying with the idea of picking up a L'Amour novel or two when I learned that L'Amour himself had written a science fiction novel set in the Four Corners area!

Haunted Mesa, which came out in 1987 and appears to have been the author's last novel, combines the parallel universe conceit with elements of modern Puebloan and ancient Mayan mythology to explicate the mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi¹ from cultural centers like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Since I've taken my own stab at that sort of thing, and have driven and camped around the Four Corners region too many times to count², I headed over to our beloved county library and checked it out.

The novel tells the story of Mike Raglan, a middle-aged professional debunker-of-mysterious-claims, who's called to a remote mesa in Navajo country by the frantic summons of his friend Erik Hokart, an eccentric but wealthy inventor. Hokart has been living on the mesa with the intent of building a house there, but the discovery of mysterious ruins, including a well-preserved kiva with a strange window, has precipitated events resulting in his disappearance. It gradually unfolds that he's held prisoner in a parallel universe, the Third World from which the ancient Anasazi emerged into our world, the Fourth World, and to which they subsequently returned. Raglan spends the first two thirds of the novel investigating the disappearance on this side of the veil, and the last third in his rescue attempt on the Other Side.

All in all, Haunted Mesa was an enjoyable novel that kept me turning the pages. Unfortunately, it has more plot holes than interdimensional portals, and more loose ends than desert jeep trails. I won't bore you with the details, but if you're someone who notices things like that, they'll jump out at you on every page. Just one example: the story begins with Raglan reading Hokart's journal, which takes him right up to the very instant Hokart was abducted from a cafe. If we pause to reflect on this, we're forced to picture Hokart leaning over the cashier's counter, writing, while shadowy forces are seizing him and firebombing the building.

Incidentally, the novel's opening chapters remind me strongly of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland. Come to think of it, the discovered journal in Borderland also ends with an absurd account of the writer's last minutes. Here's to dedicated diarists! In Haunted, though, the atmosphere of mystery and doom is quickly dissipated by a night at a resort condo.

L'Amour was a veteran writer, and I assume that issues like the ones I describe above don't represent his best work. Did he have a hard time transitioning from westerns to something set in the modern world? That can't be it. After all, he also wrote plenty of well-regarded crime stories. He died of lung cancer the very next year, so perhaps he was simply suffering from ill health. It's possible that the bulk of the book was drafted much earlier, and that he simply put together what he had to get it out there while he still could. That's just speculation, of course.

There's a lot of historical exposition, mostly consisting of the kinds of things you might have heard from a Mesa Verde park ranger circa 1987. (I camped at Mesa Verde in 1991, 2001, and 2017, and the ranger talks were different every time. Not so much in facts as in assertions and interpretations.³) These digressions are fairly repetitive and sometimes last through multiple pages. They often begin, for no discernible reason, right in the middle of the action. It struck me that a little critical editing could have made the narrative considerably tighter.

One thing I appreciate about Haunted Mesa is how conscious it is of place. Settings are described with vivid, concrete details. The plot unfolds, not against some vague southwestern backdrop, but at specific geographical locations. Actually, most of it reads like L'Amour took a trip to the area, stayed at a certain resort near Cortez, Colorado, drove (or had himself driven) up and down certain roads, and plotted his story around what he saw, which...I'm pretty sure is exactly what he did. Still, it's not a bad effect.

I took the contour map inside the back cover and (because I'm old-school like that) compared it to my folding AAA Indian Country Map, locating all the roads and landmarks mentioned in the text. Then, because I'm not an absolute luddite, I found it all on Google Earth. In case you're curious, the novel begins on a disused dirt road paralleling No Man's Mesa and passing through 37° 10' 1" N, 110° 29' 27" W; the coordinates of the haunted mesa itself are 37° 14' 30" N, 110° 31' 58" W, though I think L'Amour conflates it with the neighboring Nokai Dome when it suits him. Are all his novels that specific, I wonder? Maybe I'll find out. Or maybe not.

Without a doubt, the best part of the novel is the last third, when Raglan finally ventures into the Third World. I don't mind a bit that L'Amour took so long to get him there, because I think these things are best when nicely built up. There he teams up with a female Anasazi leader, a grizzled but genteel old cowboy trapped in the Third World for decades, and various other characters, encountering unknown technologies, a "modern" Chacoan city, a mysterious, giant-lizard-infested ruined city more ancient than Egypt or Babylon, a vast labyrinth / government palace / temple complex / library filled with traps and armed enemies, and an impending "spacequake." Pretty awesome.

So, yeah, despite the issues which a bit of good editing could have taken care of, I'm going to give Haunted Mesa a two-thumbs-up.

*

But hey, since we're on the topic of the Four Corners region, how about some pictures from my latest vacation??? We made a big counterclockwise loop, beginning with Chaco Culture National Historic Park, which lies at the end of thirty miles of rough washboard road.

Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon. It's famous for the its "sun dagger"
petroglyph, which appears to have been used by ancestral Puebloans to

mark the equinoxes and solstices. The site has shifted due to hordes of
people tramping up there to see it, and is now closed to visitors. Another
casualty of the Cultural Uncertainty Principle.

A great kiva in the Casa Rinconada complex in Chaco Canyon. Nowadays it's
theorized that the canyon served as a kind of center for ceremony and trade.

A famous view in the Pueblo Bonito complex, the largest and most intricate
of the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. It was inhabited for about 300 years
before being abandoned in the twelfth century.

I've read that Pueblo Bonito was carefully oriented according to the solar
cycle. You can get a better idea of the grandeur of the structure from this
aerial view.

Chaco Canyon at sunset, looking toward Pueblo Bonito from Pueblo del
Arroyo.

A reconstructed great kiva at the incorrectly named Aztec Ruins National
Historic Site, which lies between Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. This is
something like what the ruined kiva above might have resembled.

Mesa Verde from Balcony House. Though mostly famous for its cliff dwellings,
Mesa Verde is just as remarkable for its geology. It's a giant table of rock,
tilted toward the south, with immense cliffs along its western edge, where it
towers over the desert. From its highest point you can see Shiprock in New
Mexico.

Cliff Palace, the most famous of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, abandoned
sometime before 1300.

Mesa Verde, looking south along Navajo Canyon.

Canyon de Chelly, which is in the Navajo Nation, in Arizona. The Navajo
still farm and herd at the bottom of the canyon, which is mostly closed
to visitors. The cliffs are sheer and tower 600 to 700 feet.

Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly. The canyon was home to ancestral
Puebloans before the coming of the Navajo.

El Morro, a site frequented by travelers in northwestern New Mexico since
prehistoric times. Visitors came for the water, but left records of their passage
in the form of inscriptions on the walls. The ruins of a pueblo occupy the top,
and the Ancestral Puebloans left the earliest petroglyphs.

The waters of El Morro.

The oldest Spanish inscription, left by Juan de Oñate, conquistador and first
governor of New Mexico, in 1605. He's famous mostly for his massacre of
Acoma Pueblo, in which 800 Acoma were killed, and after which all male
prisoners over the age of twenty-five were sentenced to have their right foot
cut off. Oñate was later banished from New Mexico and exiled from Mexico
City for his use of excessive force.

Modern pueblos I've visited include Taos, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, Jemez, Zuñi, and Shongopavi (on the Hopi Reservation). The first and last mentioned are among the oldest continuously inhabited dwellings in the United States. Someone I talked to on the Hopi Reservation told me that, according to their traditions, their villages existed contemporaneously with the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, and that they absorbed some of the subsequent diaspora. Their kivas are square-shaped.

¹ Nowadays the term ancestral Puebloan seems preferable to Anasazi, which is a Navajo term. The "disappearance" L'Amour talks so much about, and which was mentioned quite often when I toured the area in 1991, is now typically ascribed to migration. The modern pueblos are held to be at least partially descended from the "Anasazi" cultures, an explanation that seemingly wasn't taken seriously back then, but is now.

² Actually, it's not too many times to count. I think it's eight.

³ Listen, everyone! Tour guides are not experts! I repeat, tour guides are not experts! They are friendly people who've memorized a number of facts and know how to answer silly questions while keeping tourists from climbing over things. That applies to most park rangers!

"Death, Destroyer of Worlds"...Reviewed!

My most recent story, "I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds," or IABDDOW for short, was favorably reviewed by Fletcher Vredenburgh over at Black Gate last week!

As can be expected from an Ordoñez story, what follows is a fusion of swords & sorcery, poetry, and mad visions. His version of the Southwest, a collision of the mythical, historical, and invented, is equally forbidding and enchanting. He is one of the truly original voices writing fantasy today, and I’m glad HFQ has provided a berth for these stories.

Charles Payseur of Quick Sip Reviews fame also gave it favorable mention.

[Carvajal] is an outsider, which means that he is an invader himself. I like how the story faces that, regardless of how benign he might seem, any foreign intrusion into these lands changes them... The action is intense, the tone a mix of horror, fantasy, and humor, and the ending a bit muted and gray. Things change, but that doesn’t mean that everything is destroyed. Another great read!

Both reviewers mention a very special Easter egg contained in this issue of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, which I think is more fun to discover for yourself. Mr. Vredenburgh is elliptical, but you should wait to read Mr. Payseur's review if you want to enjoy the full effects of your resultant nerd-out.

Please make sure also to check out the other HFQ offerings this month, including Evan Dicken's "Between Sea and Flame," a sequel to his Central American tale "Mouth of the Jaguar." Obviously I'm not the first one who decided that What the World Needs Now is Pre-Columbian / Mesoamerican / Spanish American sword-and-sorcery, and that's not a bad thing! Other delights in the issue include "Rakefire" by Jason Carney and three cool poems.

I'd also like to point out an excellent Black Gate interview with Scott Andrews, editor of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which has published many of my stories. I've been working with HFQ on my Carvajal stories because I've gotten the impression that it's everyone's favorite go-to for the old-school S&S you feel kind of guilty for reading, but BCS is, I think, unique and irreplaceable, and it's interesting to learn about what goes on behind the scenes, both practically and philosophically.

And while you're at it, don't forget this interview with Adrian Simmons and David Farney of HFQ.

"I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds" at HFQ

My most recent Tashyas story, "I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds," is live at Heroic Fantasy Quarterly. You might call it a story version of my New Mexico musings. It features an illustration by yours truly (profuse apologies to Georgia O'Keeffe):

Though I've continued to work on the third installment of my Enoch books, I've felt it necessary to slow down and step back a bit so that I can see the lie of the land with fresh eyes. Hence my excursion into sixteenth-century Tashyas, a region broadly defined as the land between the Rio Grande and the southern Mississippi. This most recent story takes place among the pueblos near modern-day Santa Fe.

There's been a lot of talk lately about cultural appropriation. I guess these stories are my contribution to the debate / exacerbation of the problem. I can understand why a people would object to seeing part of their culture crassly replicated and accessorized, even in a well-meaning way. Then again, maybe not everything labeled as cultural appropriation actually does that. The world is a strange, confusing, and sometimes horrible place. We're all in it for a limited amount of time. We have to get through it as best we can, using whatever tools come to hand.

The Greek part of my family immigrated to America through Ellis Island. My great-grandfather, a baker from Mykonos, continued to ply his trade in Illinois. I'm told that the sourdough culture he brought with him still thrives in a bakery owned by some relatives. Families tell you lots of things like that. Maybe it isn't true. It would be cool if it were. Seems like a good metaphor, at any rate. I'll leave it as an exercise to draw the application.

(My mother's cousin also tells me that Mary Robeson, a.k.a. "Moldy Mary," acquired the moldy cantaloupe from which researchers cultivated the first strain of penicillin for mass production at a grocery owned by another branch of the family in Peoria. There's a bad pun here somewhere, but I'm not going to make it.)

Being one of my well-rounded readers, you know about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Basically, what you can know about a particle's motion is inversely proportional to what you can know about its position. There's no way to observe a system without altering the system. And the smaller the system is, the more true this is.

I went camping in New Mexico and Arizona a while back. As usual, I visited a few pueblos, mostly looking to buy pottery. At one point I spent an hour talking to a shop owner on Second Mesa in Hopi. His wife sold my boy an arrowhead and a leather pouch (at a discount, because he's an ingenuous kid) and filled it with blessed cornmeal. I bought a kachina doll. It's in my living room now. Maybe it's just the way our floorboards bounce, but the doll always mysteriously rotates to face the northwest, no matter how many times we put it back in its original position...

The Hopi pueblos have been inhabited for a thousand years. They were too far out of the way to be troubled by explorers and missionaries much, and their culture shows fewer marks of outside influence. The people seem friendly but reserved, and not too keen on strangers poking around. Not the kind of place you take pictures.

It's the Cultural Uncertainty Principle. You can't observe a system without perturbing it. They're well aware of that fact. So by what right do I go there? By no right, maybe. I try to be respectful. I contribute to the economy. But perhaps it would be better to just mind my own business. I'm writing this because I don't know the answer. Probably I'll just keep doing what I've been doing.

If you were to look back in my own family tree, you'd find Bohemian farmers, Greek islanders, Berbers from the Canaries, Spanish colonists in Puerto Rico, West African slaves, and Taino Indians. I'm descended from both conquerors and conquered. Should I be apologetic, or resentful? Clearly it would be silly for me to be either.

So, I guess I'll just try to lighten the burden of living, for myself and hopefully for others as well, by writing a few more Carvajal stories with blithe unconcern.

Two Deicides and a Church

My latest painting, El Santuario de Chimayó, a 5" x 4" watercolor, depicts a church located in the western foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains north of Santa Fe. It's a curious site with possible links to Precolumbian religion; I wrote about it last year.

Amusingly, I happened to listen to H. P. Lovecraft's "The Haunter of the Dark" as I finished it. It'll appear in my exhibition on the university campus in Alpine during August and September. I'm trying to do a number of small, fairly spontaneous pieces to round out the show. The scan is not terribly faithful, unfortunately; I think I need a new scanner.

I've also continued to attempt pen-and-ink illustration. Here we have an illustration to Clark Ashton Smith's "The Coming of the White Worm," which forms part of his Hyperborea cycle:

Of course this depicts the moment Evagh the warlock plunges his bronze sword into the unclean worm, releasing "a sudden torrent of black liquescent matter" which ends his life and melts the iceberg wherein the worm resides. Note the heaps of eyeballs, which drip from the worm's empty sockets to form "two masses like stalagmites, purple and dark as frozen gore," upon the ice-floor.

Finally, an image from what may be my very favorite Klarkash-Ton tale: "The Demon of the Flower."

Here Lunithi the priest-king attempts to end the Voorqual's tyranny with a poisoned blood-offering. I've been working on a digitally-colored version, and will post it here if I ever have the patience to finish.

You know, it hadn't occurred to me before now, but the two illustrations have a common theme, don't they? Both depict attempted assassinations of weird Klarkash-Tonian gods.

Vulcan's Glory and Other Relics

When I was nine or ten, the local UHF station showed Star Trek every night at 6:00. I never missed it. Willingly, that is, as dinner often interfered.

My two best friends and I sometimes assumed Star Trek roles while playing together. Our parts were permanently assigned: they were Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy, respectively, and I was Mr. Spock. We had a cloaked starship in a corner of the schoolyard, a la Star Trek IV, and amused ourselves by telling incredulous fellow students about it.

When we exchanged gifts at the great Christmas sleepover of 1989, one of my friends gave me several Star Trek novels, which in those days could be acquired via the rotating rack in our small-town grocery store. Stop a moment and reflect on that. In 1989, you could walk into a tiny Super S Foods in rural South Texas and buy a stack of novels based on the series canceled in 1969. Hard to imagine, isn't it?

But I digress. The Christmas gift included Vulcan's Glory by D. C. Fontana, one of the best writers of the original series. I still have it in my possession, a bit tattered from riding around in my backpack for weeks, perhaps, but intact nonetheless.

I reread Vulcan's Glory this week, having gotten it out to show my kids. That's a scan of my copy above. We had just watched "Amok Time" and "Journey to Babel," two of my favorite episodes; Vulcan's Glory is in some ways a prequel to both.

The book isn't what you'd call high literature or original science fiction, but I found it surprisingly enjoyable. It takes place during Christopher Pike's tenure as captain of the Enterprise and fills in some of Spock's backstory. Fontana is credited as the writer for "Journey to Babel" and numerous other episodes, and contributed to many more; she seems responsible for much of the subtlety of character and cultural depth in the original series, especially in Mr. Spock, for whom she appears to have harbored considerable affection.

I've always been drawn to Spock. He's supremely logical but also deeply contemplative, and his character makes clear how naturally the two qualities go together. He's straightforward to the point of awkwardness, sternly self-disciplined, reserved but full of deep feeling, capable of love and self-sacrifice, and, despite his Vulcan gravity, possessed of a dry sense of humor. He's a person of mixed race species, accepted neither on Vulcan nor among humans, at home only in Starfleet. Though acutely conscious of propriety and tradition, he rebelled against his father by joining Starfleet, yet deliberately pushes himself to be more Vulcan than full-blooded Vulcans. In a way, Spock is Star Trek. And we owe him largely to Dorothy Christine Fontana.

The trouble with reading a Star Trek novel is that the narrative liberties and cost-saving shortcuts taken by a fifty-minute show become glaringly obvious in a long written work. It's a little odd, for instance, to encounter a carefully written, meditative novel premised on the ludicrous notion that persons of different species, from different planets, could have a child together. They don't even have the same anatomy, for crying out loud! And then there's teleportation. The plot hinges on a lost Vulcan relic which is discovered on a desert planet and taken aboard the Enterprise. Maybe this is just the Catholic in me talking, but I suspect that a real Vulcan would find the the notion of "beaming up" a relic deeply repugnant. It would disrupt the object's physical continuity, which is what makes a relic a relic in the first place. And that only makes me start thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the philosophical implications of teleporting persons.

Fortunately I read the book in about three sittings, so these misgivings didn't have time to lessen my joy.

*

Part of what sparked our renewed interest in things Star Trek was our visit several weeks ago to the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamogordo, where we whiled away the afternoon after White Sands got too hot. They had a lot of model rockets and whatnot, and that was all great, I guess, but what really delighted us was their collection of Star Trek memorabilia.

Here, for example, we have the spears used in "The Galileo Seven":

And here's the original letter from producer Robert H. Justman regarding the donation:

Next we have what appears to be Donald Trump's hairpiece:

But guess again! It's a tribble!!!

They also had the model of the Enterprise used in "Catspaw":

Not something I'd go out of my way for, I think, but it was fun to see some (unbeamed) relics in such an unexpected place. I'm also happy to report that my horde of brainwashed Trekkies whom I shall one day release upon the unsuspecting world beloved children recognized most of the episodes on display.

*

Among my old books I also found The Three-Minute Universe, another Christmas gift. It was my very favorite thing to read for a while, as you can tell from the tattered quality of my copy to the right. I used to have more original series books bought with my own money, but I suppose I just kept these two for sentimental value and discarded the rest long ago.

My buddy also gave me a Next Generation novel, but I naturally got rid of that thing long ago. Ugh! I just never did hold with that upstart series. My other buddy now speaks highly of Deep Space 9. Back when it came out I found it profoundly boring, but maybe I'd enjoy it now.

Anyway, I'll probably try reading The Three-Minute Universe again sometime soon. I look forward to the pleasurable mix of guilt and enjoyment.

Land of Enchantment and Atom Bombs

My painting of Taos Pueblo.

I just spent the better part of a week in the Santa Fe area. I've traveled, camped, and backpacked in New Mexico too many times to count, and Santa Fe is my favorite place to visit. Anyone who reads my blog knows that I delight in finding connections between seemingly far-separated subjects. Thanks to my trip, my brain is a whirl of such connections right now.

One thing that strikes me about Santa Fe is the almost painful juxtaposition of old and new. The region is the setting of Willa Cather's backward-looking Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) as well as Aldous Huxley's forward-looking Brave New World (1931). For both authors, the pueblos represent a link to a world rooted in the past. From the former:

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that came from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.
     "It is terrible," he said at last, as he rose.
     "Si, Padre." Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of the seam, and plastered it up again.

Whenever I'm in the area I pay a visit to Bandelier National Monument, where the Frijoles Canyon shelters the ruins of the ancient town of Tyuonyi, the descendants of whose builders dwell at Cochiti Pueblo to the south; perched almost on top of it is the National Laboratory at Los Alamos, where the Manhattan Project was undertaken and where the first atomic bombs were created; beyond that is San Ildefonso Pueblo. Thus are the forces of preservation and destruction violently juxtaposed.

Upon passing the National Laboratory on this trip, I was reminded of a quote from E. F. Schumacher's A Guide for the Perplexed, which I recently read:

The pursuit of science is a matter of taking stock and formulating recipes for action. Every recipe is a conditional sentence of the type, "If you want to achieve this or that, take such and such steps." [...] The test of a recipe is purely pragmatic – the proof of the pudding being in the eating. The perfections of this type of science are purely practical – the objective, i.e. independent of the character and interests of the operator, measurable, recordable, repeatable. Such knowledge is "public" in the sense that it can be used even by evil men for nefarious purposes; it gives power to anyone who manages to get hold of it. (Not surprisingly, therefore, many attempts are always being made to keep parts of this "public" knowledge secret!)

Schumacher opposes knowledge for manipulation (described here) to knowledge for understanding, without which our civilization is sinking ever deeper into "anguish, despair, and lack of freedom."

The Trinity nuclear test. [source]
"I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
[from the Bhagavad Gita, quoted by Robert Oppenheimer]

My interest in the history and culture of the region has led me to begin collecting pottery from the local pueblos. Each pueblo has its own distinctive style, such as the famous black-on-black technique developed by Maria Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo, which has been exhibited at world's fairs and major museums around the country.

My modest pottery collection. The second and third from the left are from
San Ildefonso, where many of Maria Martinez' kin are still in business.
The others are from Taos, Santa Clara, Acoma, and Santo Domingo.

I prefer to acquire the pottery by visiting the native artisans and sellers. Entering a pueblo is like stepping into a small foreign country, and you are very conscious of being a guest who might be tolerated but is not particularly welcome. Some, such as Santa Clara Pueblo, are fairly friendly and informal; others are quite strict, and some discourage outsiders altogether. On this trip I was fairly run off from Santo Domingo Pueblo for unknowingly approaching during a day of ceremonial dances, which are closed to outsiders.

Maria Martinez, who developed a new style of blackware, with physicist
Enrico Fermi, who worked on the Manhattan Project and created
the world's first nuclear reactor. [source]

At Santa Clara, a dealer from whom I ultimately bought a couple of pieces had a long talk with my family, explaining to my children in steps how the pottery was made. At one point he showed us a wedding picture of his grandparents: his grandfather, recently returned from service in World War I, in full uniform, beside his grandmother, looking rather sullen to have her picture taken, in a buckskin dress or robe, and two other men in full costume, with feathered headdresses. A wedding vase sat on the earth at their feet; ruinous adobe brick dwellings loomed behind.

My painting of the adobe church at Los Ranchos de Taos. This church
was painted many times by Georgia O'Keeffe. A thoroughly modern
abstract painter, she found refuge in northern New Mexico after her
years in New York.

Another site I never fail to visit is the Santuario de Chimayó, a major pilgrimage site and, depending on your outlook, a holy place or an instance of irrational fanaticism (or possibly a curious mixture of the two). The small adobe chapel, built in about 1816, lies at the bottom of a narrow valley on the High Road to Taos, surrounded by rocky red hills and juniper trees.

Chimayo in 1934. [source]

It resembles many such churches in northern New Mexico, with this exception: a tiny square room, called el pocito ("the little well"), reached through a door beside the altar, contains a round pit filled with "holy dirt," which can be taken away by the pilgrims and is reputed to perform cures. The long room running from el pocito alongside the nave holds numerous photos, ex-votos, and discarded crutches.

The town of Chimayó was named for a local hill, known as Tsi Mayoh in the Tewa tongue. Whether it was a site of devotion for the natives before colonial times is not clear. An old tradition holds that a pueblo formerly stood in the area; a book I have (purchased, of all places, at a tacky tourist gift shop in Clines Corners) describes the experiences of Maria Martinez upon visiting the chapel from nearby San Ildefonso.

My own picture of the Sanctuario, taken in 2007.

Most accounts have the chapel built by Don Bernardo Abeyta. An early member of Los Hermanos de la Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesús Nazareno (more commonly known as the Penitentes, about which more in a moment), Don Abeyta supposedly discovered an ancient crucifix at the pit's location while performing penitential exercises there on Good Friday sometime around 1810.

Signs in the Santuario museum suggest that the crucifix was left there by Spanish explorers. However that may be, Don Abeyta was seemingly devoted to the Christ of Esquipulas, worshiped at a basilica in Guatemala where the clay is also held to have curative properties, a belief possibly adopted from the native culture and "baptized" by the Spaniards. The museum speaks of the ceiba tree, which holds a central place in Maya mythology, hinting (on somewhat slender evidence, it is true) at other connections between Chimayó and the pre-Columbian religions of Central America.

Esquipulas Basilica, Guatemala, in 1895. [source]

The Penitentes are credited by some with preserving the Catholic faith in the area during the tumultuous period after the Catholic religious orders were expelled from Mexico. Cather's novel deals with the aftermath of this dark time very effectively. Linked with the medieval Flagellants (in spirit if not in historical continuity), the Penitentes were a secretive sect that the Church sought to suppress after the capture of the Southwest by the United States and the division of the current archdiocese from that of Durango.

An interesting book I have, Missions and Pueblos of the Old Southwest (1929), written by one Earle R. Forrest, who had once worked as a cowboy in the Arizona desert and had traveled throughout the area extensively before the arrival of the first automobiles, devotes a chapter to the Penitentes. According to him, the brothers would scourge themselves with chunks of cholla cactus woven into thongs of rope; crucifixion ceremonies were held in remote places at night, and sometimes the Cristo whose ardor was thus tested never returned.

The book is illustrated with photographs taken by the author; one depicts a Penitente morada, or meeting house, and another purports to be the only known photograph of a Penitente procession:

The piety of the Penitentes plays a role in Brave New World. The protagonist, John, raised on a Savage Reservation in New Mexico, becomes a sign of contradiction in the World State, and creates a public spectacle in his attempts at purification through self-flagellation:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."