Santa Clara is situated on a sandy prominence which overlooks the course of the Rio Grande del Norte from a height of about fifty feet. The village is not more than five hundred paces in a straight line from the river-bank. The view from the dune on which it stands is therefore not without attractions, but the immediate vicinity is bare and treeless. Fields, green in summer, desolate in winter, lie around it, while in the west the side of a barren table-land rises to shut off every view in that direction. Only the highest peaks of the mountains of Abiquin look down furtively, as it were, upon the barren hillside of rubbish and gravel.
A broad view is spread out toward the east. The course of the Rio Grande is visible from north to south for a length of ten English miles. A dark mesa, the Mesa de la Canoa, shuts off the northern horizon, while the river is lost sight of in the south at the foot of a grand isolated rock of dark lava--the Mesa de San Ildefonso. A narrow but fertile valley forms the eastern shore, on the other side of which stretches the chain of the high mountains--the wild Sierra de la Truchas, the massive flat dome of the Sierra de Nambe, and the Pico de la Laguna. The range descends in terraces to the south, where the city of Santa Fé lies hidden at its foot. All these peaks exceed twelve thousand, the Truchas thirteen thousand, feet in height, and they are often crowned by snow-fields in summer.
If one stands, in the evening, when the sun is setting and the shadows are already cast over the valleys, on the swell above the church of Santa Clara, he will see the snow-peaks glowing for a little while in fiery red. The crags of the Truchas blaze like flowing ore. An Alpine lustre is displayed, less soft in colors than that of the central mountains of Europe, but much more intense and longer lasting. The mountains stand out ghostly pale as soon as the last glow is extinguished, and a white shroud appears to rest upon the landscape.
In this homely Indian village has lain concealed for many years a treasure of historical knowledge, an archive rich for America, so poor in archives, of the history of New Mexico. The Indians preserve and guard the treasure with superstitious care. It was entrusted to them years ago; and although their care for it has been limited to a superstitious guardianship and a cautious preservation, and no catalogue exists and no thought is taken of the greedy mice, the papers are still tolerably well preserved, and might safely lie there for yet many a year, suspiciously watched by men to whom the text is still a puzzle--for to them reading is a mystery, and the art of writing seems a kind of magic.