“This is horrible!”
“It could get worse,” Longarm said. “Miranda, if you want, we could go back to Durango, I could put you on a stagecoach for Pueblo, and from there you could get to Denver.”
“No! I’m not going to run out on you now.”
“It would be the smart thing to do,” he told her.
“Smart thing or not, the answer is still no!”
“All right then,” Longarm said grimly as they pushed hard for the southern mesas. “We’ll just have to find our own way up to Mesa Verde and, once we arrive, take our chances.”
Chapter 13
The trail up to Mesa Verde was easy enough to follow, and two days later, Longarm and Miranda came upon their first Anasazi ruins.
“Would you just look at that!” Miranda cried with excitement. “It’s so big!”
These were mesa-top ruins, and Longarm had read enough about Mesa Verde to know that the Anasazi people had lived and farmed up on the flat mesa centuries before building their famed cliff dwellings.
When Longarm and Miranda reached what appeared to be an ancient village made entirely of rock, logs, and mud, they dismounted and stepped forward to investigate.
“How big was this?” Miranda asked, looking up at the high rock walls. “And how old?”
“I have no idea,” Longarm answered. “But it will be fun to have a look around.”
The ruins were silent and overgrown with grass and even some pinyon pines, yet they were substantial and still impressive with their stairways, round ceremonial pits, and sturdy rock walls. Longarm was greatly impressed by the industry of a people who must have labored for generations to create these silent stone edifices.
“Come this way,” he said, leading Miranda around a broken wall and then coming to the entrance of what appeared to be a corridor of small, dark rooms.
“I wonder how many people lived in this village,” Miranda said, ducking through a narrow doorway into the series of connecting compartments that were less than ten feet square.
“I would expect at least a hundred people once lived in this place,” Longarm said.
Miranda craned her head back. “Look how solidly they built their roofs. Why, I bet horses could have ridden over them and not fallen through.”
It was true, even if these people had lived in this place long before the Spanish conquistadors first brought horses to North America. The light was poor, but Longarm could see that the Anasazi had used logs to cover their rock-walled compartments, and then had filled in the roof cracks with mud mixed with leaves, grass, and bark, which had, in turn, been covered by a deep layer of rock and dirt. Most of the small rooms were connected by key- shaped doorways, which Longarm had trouble squeezing through because he was so much larger than the ancient ones who’d lived and raised their families there.
“I can almost feel their spirits,” Miranda whispered, kneeling and brushing the floor with her fingertips. “And just look at these dirt floors. They are as hard-packed as if they were composed of granite.”
Longarm ran his fingers down one of the old pine door frames worn smooth by the touch of countless hands over countless centuries. He inhaled deeply, feeling the aura of a long-lost people whose daily life he could not begin to imagine. Had they lived in these small, dim dungeons only during the coldest months of winter, and then lived outdoors the remainder of the year? Had each of these rooms had fires for warmth, and if so, where would the smoke escape and why weren’t there soot marks on the ceilings? Were these cold dirt floors once covered with animal skins, and did laughter resound through these stone catacombs as children played, women worked, and men went out to hunt? Probably.
Longarm marveled at the engineering and industry of these people. He did not expect to find artifacts because they would all have been picked clean by the discoverers and the first tourists. Yet he could not help but feel that, if he had but a few hours to spare, he could probe just a little here and there and be assured of making his own discoveries. Perhaps a burial site or a prized Anasazi weapon hidden in some crevice. Or a perfect piece of pottery such as he had seen at Laird’s museum tucked secretly away into some yet undiscovered niche or cranny in the stone walls.
Miranda shuddered. “I don’t understand why these people didn’t build window holes for sunlight,” she said.
“My guess would be that windows would have allowed more cold winter air and wind to get inside.”
“You’re probably right, but I need sunlight.”
“There’s a doorway in the next compartment,” Longarm told her. “We can climb out there.”
They exited into what Longarm guessed was once a second-story courtyard where women probably ground corn and prepared most of their meals. The enclosure was rectangular and about forty by sixty feet, sided by the crumbling remains of what had been third-story rooms. In one corner of the courtyard lay the ashes of a recent campfire, which Longarm judged to be a sad and irreverent reminder of his own far more acquisitive culture. The shards of broken whiskey bottles and the rusting tin cans made his lips curl with contempt.
“Plunderers,” he said, pointing to a large and offensive hole in the courtyard that someone had recently dug in hope of finding valuable artifacts.
“It’s a travesty,” Miranda said, “that anyone and everyone can just come up here and begin digging and tearing up these ancient ruins.”
“You’re right. When I return to Denver, I’m going to see what can be done to get Mesa Verde federal protection. These sites ought to be preserved for future generations.”
“I wonder if whoever dug this area up found anything especially valuable.”
“I hope not,” Longarm said, moving off to examine what he knew was called a kiva, an underground ceremonial chamber.
