The Delight Makers | Page 5

therefore, that some traditions and myths are
preserved to-day among the Pueblos concerning these cave-villages.
Thus the Tehua Indians of the pueblo of Santa Clara assert that the
artificial grottos of what they call the Puiye and the Shufinne, west of
their present abodes, were the homes of their ancestors at one time. The
Queres of Cochiti in turn declare that the tribe to which they belong,
occupied, many centuries before the first coming of Europeans to New
Mexico, the cluster of cave-dwellings, visible at this day although
abandoned and in ruins, in that romantic and picturesquely secluded
gorge called in the Queres dialect Tyuonyi, and in Spanish "El Rito de
los Frijoles."
The Rito is a beautiful spot. Situated in a direct line not over twenty
miles west of Santa Fé, it can still be reached only after a long day's
tedious travel. It is a narrow valley, nowhere broader than half a mile;
and from where it begins in the west to where it closes in a dark and
gloomy entrance, scarcely wide enough for two men to pass abreast, in
the east, its length does not exceed six miles. Its southern rim is formed
by the slope of a timbered mesa, and that slope is partly overgrown by
shrubbery. The northern border constitutes a line of vertical cliffs of
yellowish and white pumice, projecting and re-entering like decorations
of a stage,--now perpendicular and smooth for some distance, now
sweeping back in the shape of an arched segment. These cliffs vary in

height, although nowhere are they less than two hundred feet. Their
tops rise in huge pillars, in crags and pinnacles. Brushwood and pine
timber crown the mesa of which these fantastic projections are but the
shaggy border.
Through the vale itself rustles the clear and cool brook to which the
name of Rito de los Frijoles is applied. It meanders on, hugging the
southern slope, partly through open spaces, partly through groves of
timber, and again past tall stately pine-trees standing isolated in the
valley willows, cherry-trees, cottonwoods, and elders form small
thickets along its banks. The Rito is a permanent streamlet
notwithstanding its small size. Its water freezes in winter, but it never
dries up completely during the summer months.
Bunches of tall grass, low shrubbery, and cactus grow in the open
spaces between rocky débris fallen from above. They also cover in part
low mounds of rubbish, and ruins of a large pentagonal building
erected formerly at the foot of a slope leading to the cliffs. In the cliffs
themselves, for a distance of about two miles, numerous caves dug out
by the hand of man are visible. Some of these are yet perfect; others
have wholly crumbled away except the rear wall. From a distance the
port-holes and indentations appear like so many pigeons' nests in the
naked rock. Together with the cavities formed by amygdaloid chambers
and crevices caused by erosion, they give the cliffs the appearance of a
huge, irregular honeycomb.
These ruins, inside as well as outside the northern walls of the cañon of
the Rito, bear testimony to the tradition still current among the Queres
Indians of New Mexico that the Rito, or Tyuonyi, was once inhabited
by people of their kind, nay, even of their own stock. But the time
when those people wooed and wed, lived and died, in that secluded
vale is past long, long ago. Centuries previous to the advent of the
Spaniards, the Rito was already deserted. Nothing remains but the ruins
of former abodes and the memory of their inhabitants among their
descendants. These ancient people of the Rito are the actors in the story
which is now to be told; the stage in the main is the Rito itself. The
language of the actors is the Queres dialect, and the time when the

events occurred is much anterior to the discovery of America, to the
invention of gunpowder and the printing-press in Europe. Still the Rito
must have appeared then much as it appears now,--a quiet, lovely,
picturesque retreat, peaceful when basking in the sunlight, wonderfully
quiet when the stars sparkled over it, or the moon shed its floods of
silver on the cliffs and on the murmuring brook below.
In the lower or western part of its course the Tyuonyi rushes in places
through thickets and small groves, out of which rise tall pine-trees. It is
very still on the banks of the brook when, on a warm June day,
noon-time is just past and no breeze fans the air; not a sound is heard
beyond the rippling of the water; the birds are asleep, and the noise of
human activity does not reach there from the cliffs. Still, on the day of
which we are now speaking, a voice arose from the