Explore "The Spanish Pioneers" by Charles Fletcher Lummis on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Some of the most characteristic heroisms and hardships of the Pioneers in our domain cluster about the wondrous rock of Acoma, the strange sky-city of the Queres[10] Pueblos. All the Pueblo cities were built in positions which Nature herself had fortified, -- a necessity of the times, since they were surrounded by outnumbering hordes of the deadliest warriors in history; but Acoma was most secure of all. In the midst of a long valley, four miles wide, itself lined by almost insurmountable precipices, towers a lofty rock, whose top is about seventy acres in area, and whose walls, three hundred and fifty-seven feet high, are not merely perpendicular, but in most places even overhanging. Upon its summit was perched -- and is to-day -- the dizzy city of the Queres.
The few paths to the top -- whereon a misstep will roll the victim to horrible death, hundreds of feet below -- are by wild, precipitous clefts, at the head of which one determined man, with no other weapons than stones, could almost hold at bay an army.