Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

The desert down there has a peculiar horror; I do not mean thirst, nor Indian massacres, which are frequent. The very floor of the world is cracked open into countless canyons and arroyos, fissures in the earth which are sometimes ten feet deep, sometimes a thousand.

As the churchmen walked up and down the promenade watching the stars come out, their talk touched upon many matters, but they avoided politics, as men are apt to do in dangerous times.

“Ácoma!”

Riding on, they presently drew rein under the Enchanted Mesa, and Jacinto told him that on this, too, there had been a village, but the stairway which had been the only access to it was broken off by a great storm many centuries ago, and its people had perished up there from hunger.

But how, the Bishop asked him, did men first think of living on the top of naked rocks like these, hundreds of feet in the air, without soil or water?

They carried him down the ladder and through the cloister and across the rock to the most precipitous cliff—the one over which the Ácoma women flung broken pots and such refuse as the turkeys would not eat.

The women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the garden pine and waste away from thirst, and ventured into the cloisters to laugh and chatter at the whitening foliage of the peach trees, and the green grapes shrivelling on the vines.

Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.

the light and elastic mesh of the French tongue.