Each of the pueblos has its own feast-days, or "fiestas," when, for a time varying from a day to over a week, the whole population devotes its time to feasting, dancing and games. The religious rites that are performed and the strange customs that prevail at these feasts and dances form in themselves a vast and interesting study.
At Isleta the road again crossed the Rio Grande. This done, it found itself in a dry sandy wilderness, with the Manzano Range running from north to south in the distance. In patches the ground was white with sandhills, and the trail became two straggling white lines, where the wheels of passing vehicles had left their imprint in the soft white sand. These two white ruts were my only guides. All around was desolation. Nothing was to be seen anywhere, save those two thin white lines straggling aimlessly ahead, the sun-scorched desert with its ragged stones and evil, scanty, tenacious vegetation, and on the horizon that fiery stretch of mountain range, whose peaks rose rugged and defiant and glistened with red as if roused to anger by the eternally raging sun. I had never before realized the great depth of feeling that a mountain range is capable of evoking. The Alps are majestic beyond description. They awe the observer to a sense of his own utter insignificance as he gazes upon that glistening majestic sky-line, and feels the overwhelming influence of those mighty mountains upon him. But if it is an overwhelming influence, it is a friendly one--at least I have found it so. Although there is an instinct in me, as in most people, impelling me to guard and protect myself against anything that is tremendous--a relic, I suppose, of prehistoric days--I feel towards the Alps always like a little boy feels towards his "big brother." The same feeling is seen reflected in the "Sierra Madre" (Mother Mountains) of California.
But in New Mexico I have seen huge ranges that one could truthfully call nothing else but "wicked." They seem to gaze and glower with a cruel, terrifying gleam upon the wanderer who defies their hateful solitude. The hours of travel that followed were hours of weary monotony. A brief lapse every thirty miles or so when a tiny Mexican village on the Rio Grande was passed, and once more the two white ruts came into view, the stones and cactus, and again the evil mountains.