The road continued twisting downward, its curves even narrower, bordered only by a margin of soft shoulder. Emma hugged the center line, letting the sloping grade make its own speed, trusting the road. Connolly felt his ears pop. Here and there he saw signs of settlement, the surprise of a few fruit trees blossoming after so many miles of dark pine. The views began to open out to a wider sky, until finally they were near the bottom and the hills disappeared entirely, like curtains pulled back to show an immense panorama of red sandstone buttes and mesas, a sky beyond measuring. It was the most spectacular landscape Connolly had ever seen.
On 44 they drove on a highway river, entering sandstone canyons dotted with slides of red rock and juniper whose walls grew higher and higher around them until they were completely surrounded by rock and then, a bend in the road, opening out again to a blue tent of sky. This was the West he had always imagined and never seen, not the cactus emptiness of the desert at Trinity, not even the greasewood and sage arroyo country of the Rio Grande, but land that seemed to exist at the beginning of time, monumental, so resistant to man that it found its beauty in geology, as if vegetation were a hapless afterthought. The mountains to the right seemed the border of the known world. Before them, the giant mesas rose up like islands from an old ocean floor, the distances between them whole seas of sandy earth. The walls were striated, discrete sediment layers of white and yellow and maroon and red, a color map of time, with slabs of rock broken or withered into shapes, statues of what might have been gods.
He felt her smiling beside him, enjoying his reaction. When they finally left the twists of canyon walls and headed straight across the empty flat plateau, the promised heat arrived in a bright glare that flooded the open country with light. They rolled down the windows now to catch the dry air, baked with dust and sage. Clouds were everywhere, darting back and forth making shadows, so that the tawny grass would turn gray for an instant, then gleam yellow again when they passed. He saw chollo cactus and thin bushes whose names he didn’t know, survivors. The sun burned through the windshield. They were alone on the road, nothing around them for miles but a desolate landscape alive with clouds and shadows and hot wind.
When they entered Chaco wash, they left the highway and bounced along a narrow dirt road, trailing dust behind them like smoke. Emma slowed down, dodging ruts and dry potholes with only a trace of moisture on their cracked muddy bottoms.
“You said it was remote,” Connolly said. “How much more of this?”
“Twenty miles or so.” She grinned. “It discourages the fainthearted.”
“God. Let’s not break down.”
“Think of the Anasazi. They walked.”
He looked out at the desert again, trying to imagine it filled with people. “Why here?”
“No one knows. Presumably it was wetter then, but not much. They’ve found logs that must have been carried over forty miles-so why not build where the trees were? But they didn’t. It’s one of the mysteries.”
“What are the others?”
“Mainly what happened to them. They disappeared about eight hundred years ago. Just like that. It all just stopped. There were settlements everywhere-there’s a big one near the Hill, in Frijoles Canyon-and then nothing.”
“They all died?”
“Well, the archaeological record did. Probably they became the Hopis. Pueblo architecture’s much the same-block dwelling, kivas, the lot. But no one really knows. It’s difficult without writing. Imagine the Egyptians without hieroglyphics.”
“Then how do we know their name?”
“We don’t know what they called themselves. Anasazi’s our name for them. Navajo. Park Service says it means ‘the ancient ones,’ but I read somewhere that it actually means ‘ancestors of my enemies.’ Quite a difference. Of course, that fits perfectly with the Hopi theory-they’re still fighting the Navajos. Here we are. Watch out for the park ranger. Nobody comes here anymore, since gas rationing, and he’ll talk your head off if you let him.”
