I should have started for home next day; by now I had used up all the "research" justification for the trip. Time to go home and get to work on the damn book...but I was tired and I could spare another day.

So I spent most of this one screwing around on blacktop roads to the south of the Interstate, and found a few things worth seeing.

In particular there was El Morro. It would be an imposing sight in its own right, except that there's nothing unusual about spectacular rock formations in these parts; you get so you hardly even notice them.

But El Morro has a special interest; people have been coming there for a very long time, and leaving their marks behind them. Clear back in the fourteenth century, there were a couple of flourishing Anasazi towns on top of the mesa; but these contemporaries of Wat Tyler and John of Gaunt were by no means first. Long before, the big mesa must have been a familiar landmark to prehistoric people, if only because of the good reliable waterhole at its base. And, being human, they yielded to the irresistible temptation to record their presence in the soft sandstone of the cliff.

The hands are what get you; at least they were what got me. A handprint has a special individuality: a memento not just of a people, but of a person. Science fiction has fantasized about portals in time, but nothing reaches across the centuries quite like the handprints of these aboriginal Kilroys.

Here as everywhere else, the Anasazi disappeared as cryptically as they had come - their survivors perhaps absorbed by the later pueblo builders - and in time a strange and violent people arrived, claiming the land for a distant monarch and preaching a new religion; and they too made a point of recording their presence, wherever they could find a blank bit of sandstone, and so messages announcing that this or that party passed por aqui coexist with carvings of extinct beasts.

And, as tends to happen, the conquerors, or rather their descendants, were themselves conquered by newer arrivals, who added their brags to the collection. I could have indulged in lofty philosophizing about human vanity, but was the impulse behind these scratchings so different from my own desire to see my name on the cover of a book?

I rode on down the road, getting into Zuni country now.

And then there was no more New Mexico and, I realized, no more trip. Time to go back home, and a long ride it was going to be. Well, at least I'd have the wind behind me.