I didn't go back over the mountains, though I was tempted; I rode on down through Santa Fe and picked up the Interstate. The wind was up again, gusting violently across the highway and causing some interesting wobbles, but after I turned west at Albuquerque it was mostly from dead ahead, resisting me and cutting into gas mileage but no longer threatening control. Off to the north of the Slab somebody's pueblo spread over a hillside; I didn't know which one.

Acoma Pueblo is almost as strange a place as Bandelier, in its way, and considerably more of a going concern, being still inhabited - at least by some, though nowadays most of the tribal members live in somewhat more modern communities down on the flatland, coming up to the old pueblo for special occasions. It may be the oldest continously inhabited town in North America; only Old Oraibi, in the Hopi country, can compete, and you can get up a pretty good argument about that in some circles. I don't think anybody knows the answer for sure.

I paid for admission and camera privileges at the little information center down by the road. No filming or videotaping allowed, they cautioned; I assured them I had no such equipment, and they gave me a yellow sticker to put on my camera to show that I'd paid for the right to use it. You can't just stroll in; everybody piled into an old school bus which gasped and groaned up the one-lane road to the top. The driver was having a lot of trouble with the worn-out clutch; he and I exchanged grins as I got off.

Up on top of the mesa, the town itself looks pretty much like any other pueblo of the old-fashioned sort: blocky adobe buildings with protruding roof-beam ends and ladders or outside stairs going up to the second story. No doubt a Pueblo Indian would be able to spot differences in architectural styles, but to me they didn't look perceptibly different from those of, say, Taos.

Something curious about these pictures, though: no people. You might get the impression of a silent deserted town, but in fact there were people all over the place, working at various tasks or just walking around. And nobody showed any particular aversion or hostility to the camera. Yet somehow whenever a picture got taken they were just somewhere else.

There were the familiar outdoor ovens, too, that you can see in any pueblo, where they bake that wonderful oven bread.

Once out from among the clustered buildings, though, all familiarity vanishes; there's nothing like this at Taos or Laguna or Hotevilla or anywhere else. Outhouses perch on the edge of empty space; whatever else can be said about the Keres, it cannot be denied that they shit farther than any other Indian tribe.

The tour was over; most of the visitors filed into the little shop to buy souvenirs. I didn't care to wait, and I wasn't keen on the prospect of the bus ride back down; I asked the girl if I could climb down on my own. She gave me an appraising look and said, "Sure," and showed me a place where, according to tradition, an early Catholic priest had been pushed off the cliff after he started getting hard to take. "You can climb down there," she said. "Be careful." I told her I'd try to go a little slower than the priest did and she giggled.

It was getting late by the time I got back to the Interstate. According to the map there was a park with a campground some miles off the Slab, down a side road not far away. I rode as fast as I dared - there was a good deal of construction going on, and the pavement was dodgy in places - and followed the route indicated; but when I got there I couldn't see a damn thing. Finally I located the "park": a bunch of little yellow survey flags out in the middle of a deserted plain. I had forgotten the mendacity of the official New Mexico road maps, which cheerfully show things that exist only as vague plans for the future.

It wasn't funny, though; by now the sun was getting low and clouds were moving in, and the air was turning distinctly chilly. By the time I got back up to the Interstate it was dark and getting very damn cold. The only hope was a state park a good hour farther on.

Actually it wasn't a good hour, it was a very bad hour indeed, and more. I was freezing, riding into that cold wind. I had some warmer clothes in my luggage, but there was nowhere to change. I almost stopped at Grants and looked for a motel, but I ground my teeth and kept going and finally there was the exit for Bluewater Lake.

The nice old couple who ran the campground let me into the snack bar, even though it was closed for the night, and fixed me up with a cup of hot coffee, and waited while I got warm enough to function. Crawling into the bag a little while later, I called down silent blessings on them, and extreme maledictions on the lying bastards who drew up that map.