The Little Spires

...but everywhere, in village as well as in town, there were the little spires...

...Coming home, the desolation of the day was softened by the melancholy of twilight...

...Wherever man has stopped his journeying, and put a roof over him, there you can see a little spire...

...Old Nick-if you will have it that way-had been prodding us, too, for days with particularly vivid memories of Albuquerque, and of the old Mexican woman who can get up tamales and tortillas and enchiladas that would make Sancho Panza wistful-and, of course, of the Bourbon whisky from Old Mexico...

...And in the court of the cathedral a weatherstained figure of Archbishop Lamy stands, reminding you, like the tireless tongues of the bells, of a heritage that is changeless...

...As our car swung out on the narrow, winding Santa Fe Trail, we were not entirely without compunction, as all frail mortal flesh-and particularly such as ours that had known so long the penitential discipline of sanatoria-has in the face of derring do...

...we had both thought of them like that, and looked at one another later when a flock of desert orioles wheeled above us...

...Defiance had been gathering in us simultaneously, and it was in an instant that we had agreed to break the oppressive captivity of bed and thermometer...

...We wondered how life had ever come here and found this place, how human feet had ever dared the journeys that had built this trail...

...Their blankets and their strange brown faces could not be changed a great deal from that distant time of their fathers, and there across the tracks the padres had left their more imperishable memorial, a crumbling little temple you might mistake for a granary or byre if it were not for the airy, miniature spire...

...It was like Mike standing there and calling out a "Buenas dias le de Dios...

...At Domingo, Indians from the Pueblo had come in to wait for the stage and tourists...

...THE LITTLE SPIRES By DOUGLAS POWERS THE little city of the sky was not azure, but dun, that morning in early January when we left the friend who had brewed for us his special chicory-flavored coffee, and went shivering across the open plaza, with the winds snarling down on us like great shaggy hounds from the hills...

...They had been dauntless feet, and hearts far sturdier than the hearts of soldiers had sent them on, pushed them on paths that had known only the shadows of the wings of birds and the trackless steps of Indians...

...A loneliness as immense as the vast distances was gathering like the stir of a storm over everything, and the twinkle of a light from some far-off window was as friendly as the clasp of a hand...

...Maybe it was that, and not the cold, that made us shiver...

...Along the tips of the Sandia range, the mists were gone, and a long strip of azure poured an amber light across the foothills...

...Lord calls him Mike, and tells me he has been extraordinarily good to him...

...In every little village and town along the way, there stands somewhere among the poor adobe homes, the straw lean-tos for cattle, the pinched little fields with sheep or goats in them, the conspicuous church with its conical spire and tiny little cross...

...Like the huge cross on the hill out toward the Tesuque Pueblo, pointing its arms over mountain and canyon and belonging, like them, to that gaunt grandeur that crowds against the very sky, the memory of the Franciscans lives on through all this country, mingling with mountain and pinon-dotted canyon and plain in the mystery that you know only star and saint can tell...

...Mike would have said the courtly old thing that the Spanish- alas!-are forgetting now...

...Santa Fe, city of the holy Faith, is, as you would have it be, full of the sound of bells, as leafy greenness is of the sound of birds...

...from the days whose courtly speech is gone now from all but the lips of very old men...

...They were all we saw, just as they had been the only ones here when the padres first brought the cross and civilization to them...

...In the ethereal shine from the frozen fields, it seemed, in the distance, like a silver chalice in the centre of a glory of candlelight...

...Up a sloping, narrow street, the twin towers of Saint Francis cathedral framed a section of the Sangue de Cristo peaks, pearled with snow and mist...

...The day was as grey as tears, the horizons like the dreary walls of a sanatorium stretched to infinity...

...But you can follow their march unfailingly...

...I suppose it was "Vaya con Dios...

...Lord was happier when we were passing old San Miguel again...

...Lord and I still believe, however, without the slightest thought of irreverence, that it was his guardian angel...

...With no sun, the great distances seemed shrunken, and the mountains huddled sullenly in their desolation of snow...

...At a bend in San Felipe, after you have passed stubble and stunted trees and skinny dogs that put a chill bleakness in you, two darkened, cupola-shaped steeples come suddenly swooping down on you like giant birds...

...The towers of the cathedral tumbled a bronze clamor down on us...

...There the trail of the brown-cowled men went on, dauntlessly, deathlessly on, and it is always the same...

...After the thrilling descent of La Bajada, that makes you wonder how the legs of any man could have endured in the hope of passing it, the more habitable country brought more frequent signs of life...

...And yet you feel that neither time nor man can change the names and the imagery that the brown-cowled Spaniards put upon this land and this place when they first brought the tabernacle here into the very aerie of the eagle...

...You should have Lord describe him to you...

...But then we passed the ancient church of San Miguel, and Lord brightened...

...and the greyness and dimness made it hard to think of the sunset coming with its gleaming spikes to make the mountainside run scarlet again with the Blood of Christ...

...The memories were vivid in us when we passed back over La Bajada into the heights again...

...It was revolt that was moving us, the revolt that comes like a madness sometimes when tuberculosis has been working its slow ruin for many years inside you...

...He is a fiery redhead, and has freckles...

...If even the mountains look humble in that vastness and solitude, one cannot be long thinking of himself, however atrabilious the tubercle bacillus is making him...

...Ahead of us the tallest hill on the horizon was like the mound of mud some small boy plays with, and the road wound sinuously like a pigmy river across the deep canyon and passed through a tiny cleft like a piece of thread running through the eye of a needle...

...It was a day for the buzzards to be out, a day for death and the things that follow death...

...We shall never forget, Lord and I, approaching the little white spire of Algodones...

...Mike was saying...