In the summer of 2007, my wife and I spent two weeks travelling by car in the American south-west from Colorado to Nevada, passing through New Mexico and Utah en route, where we saw scenes of astounding unearthly magnificence and beauty in sweeping landscapes of deep canyons, rocky buttes, plateaus of mesa, barren desert, spiky sawtooth mountain peaks above Las Cruces, and patchy scrub interspersed with expanses of yucca, sagebrush, occasional Christmas cactus and baby palm trees. The only signs of life in some of these silently majestic places were the sound of crickets, the scamper of jackrabbits, and a frequent bird of prey gliding above on a thermal. What follows is a highly edited version of the 30 pages of diary entries I wrote on a daily basis, as the original is far too long to include here in its entirety.
Park Point Overlook in Mesa Verde’s National Park in New Mexico provides a spectacular view, from 8500 feet above sea level, of miles and miles of empty countryside where in the still air, with the hot sun beating down on us, the only sound came from the whirring of innumerable grasshoppers. In many places throughout the region we could hear only the sound of the wind blowing in from afar, the same wind that had helped shape extraordinary creations of rock over thousands, or millions, of centuries. Nature is a superhuman sculptor, and in the process created in this National Park living space for the indigenous Pueblo Indians in stone villages built in the shelter of massive overhanging cliffs above them, in the form of Cliff Palace in the aptly-named Cliff Canyon. Now parties of tourists can climb into the long-abandoned ‘pueblo’ in the company of guides, glance into empty rooms, and marvel that communities once lived and built their homes there. Pueblo people also built ‘kivas,’ the underground circular chambers probably used for spiritual or social occasions, which we saw and photographed in Aztec, New Mexico, and which were reminiscent for me of flint mines built by Neolithic people at Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, England, some 4,000 years ago.
I was especially struck by the El Morro National Monument, also in New Mexico, a huge sandstone landmark for Spaniards searching (in vain, alas!) for El Dorado and for wagon trains heading west to Sacramento years later, inscribed in Spanish at eye level by passing travellers from 1620 until 1850, and thereafter solely in English, a moving testament to the life that has flowed past this rock for 400 years. All around the rock is inscrutable silence under a hot sun until the wind picks up and blows through the ponderosa pines.
El Morro National Monument, New Mexico
