PADRE MARTINEZ
the distant mountains; then without warning, one suddenly found oneself upon the brink of a precipice, of a chasm in the earth over two hundred feet deep, the sides sheer cliffs, but cliffs of earth, not rock. Drawing rein at the edge, one looked down into a sunken world of green fields and gardens, with a pink adobe town, at the bottom of this great ditch. The men and mules walking about down there, or plowing the fields, looked like the figures of a child’s Noah’s ark. Down the middle of the arroyo, through the sunken fields and pastures, flowed a rushing stream which came from the high mountains. Its original source was so high, indeed, that by merely laying an open wooden trough up the opposite side of the arroyo, the Mexicans conveyed the water to the plateau at the top. This sluice was laid in sections that zigzagged up the face of the cliff. Father Vaillant always stopped to watch the water rushing up the side of the precipice like a thing alive; an ever-ascending ladder of clear water, gurgling and clouding into silver as it climbed. Only once before, he used to tell the natives, in Italy, had he seen water run up hill like that.
The water thus diverted was but a tiny thread of the full creek; the main stream ran down the arroyo over a white rock bottom, with green willows and deep hay grass and brilliant wild flowers on its banks. Evening primroses, the fireweed, and butterfly weed
167
