The river churches followed two designs. One was that of a long narrow straight box; the other that of a cross, with shallow transepts. Where transepts occurred, the builders lifted a higher roof over them and the sanctuary in a gesture of grace; for where this higher portion rose above the long nave, they placed a clerestory window reaching the width of the nave that took in the light of the sky and let it fall upon the altar, while the rest of the interior remained in shadow. The only other occasional windows were two or three small, high openings in the thinner of the long side walls.
Entering by the main door anyone had his attention taken to the altar by many cunningly planned devices of which the first was the pour of wide and lovely light from the clerestory whose source was hidden by the ceiling of the shadowy nave. The builders used the science of optical illusion in false perspectives to make the nave seem longer, the approach to heaven and altar more august and protracted. The apse, tall and narrow, tapered toward the rear wall like the head of a coffin. Where there were transepts, the body of man was prefigured ail-evidently—the head lying in the sanctuary, the arms laid into the transepts, and all the length of the nave the narrow-ribbed barrel and the thin hips and the long legs inert in mortal sacrifice. Many churches added one further symbol and illusion: the rear wall of the sanctuary was built upon another axis than that of the nave. It suggested two things—the fall of Christ’s head to one side as He hung on the cross; the other, a farther dimension to the house that honored Him. All such variation of symmetry, and modulation of perspective, combined with inexact workmanship and humble materials, resulted in an effect of spontaneity and directness, like that in a drawing made by a child to fulfill a great wish. The wish, the emotion, transcended the means, and stood embodied forth in grave impersonal intimacy.
* Excepting an arched doorway at Pecos.
Over the adobe texture was placed by the women a plaster of mud. They applied it with the palms of their hands and sometimes smoothed it with a patch of sheepskin bearing fleece. The outer walls in time bore the same marks of the weather as the ancient natural forms of earth all about—little watercourses that ran making wrinkles which when dry came to resemble the marks of life in an old sun-browned face. And yet with even such sensitive response to the elements, an unattended adobe building weathered down only one inch in twenty years. In any proper town the walls were replastered after every rainy reason. The walls were renewed so long as human life used them. Some stood for centuries after being abandoned, and still stand in part, above talus of their own yielding as they go ever so slowly back to the earth.
The interior walls received a coat of whitewash and on this in pure colors the people painted designs, as though they were decorating great unrolled surfaces of clay pots. Scrolls, parrots, columns; flowers and cornstalks; symbols of sun, rain, lightning, thunder and the oblique slan tings of terraced forms that took an impression of the landscape receding from the river. Many of the frescoes had not only an Indian but also a strangely Byzantine air, as though a new hybrid culture must turn back to relive all the stages of its various influences.
Finally, before the front of the church a walled enclosure was completed where the blessed dead could lie, and where, against the façade an outdoor altar could be set in a sort of atrium to accommodate large crowds on feast days and Sundays.
From a little distance then the finished building gave its purpose with hard grandeur in its loom and weight, its grace of plain angular shadow, and the wide sunlight on its unbroken faces, where the shadows of the vigas bladed down the walls making a sundial that told not hours but centuries. The whole mission with church, convento, cloister and walled burial field seemed like a shoulder of earth emerging out of the blind ground as a work of living sculpture. To see the true beauty of those structures it was necessary first of all to love and to believe in their purpose.
With the establishment of the “missions of occupation” came the need of a train to bring supplies from Mexico every three years. An invoice of 1620 showed aside from common tools and builders’ supplies a variety of foodstuffs, clothing, and articles of religious use. The Father President at Domingo received for distribution many boxes of salt pork, cheese, shrimps, haddock, dogfish; lima beans, lentils, frijoles; rosemary and lavender; white sugar, salt, pepper, saffron and cinnamon; preserved peaches and quinces and sweetmeats; noodles, Condado almonds, Campeche honey, Castile rice, cloves, ginger and nutmeg; and wine, olive oil and Castile vinegar. On his lists he checked frying pans, brass mixing mortars, tin wine vessels with pewter dishes, and leather wine bags. To clothe his friars he noted Córdoban shoes, Mexican sandals, leggings, kidskin hats with cords, sackcloth and Rouen linen in bolts, and to work these materials, papers of pins, sixteen hundred needles, twenty-four pounds of thread and fifty-two pairs of scissors. To take the missioners on their visits he issued travelling bags for bedding, and leather saddlebags and saddles and heavy Michoacan cloth of tents, and tin boxes in which to carry the Host. For the infirmaries he checked one hundred and seven Mexican blankets.
To furnish the altars he distributed frontals of Chinese damask, with borders of brocatel and fringes of silk, and lined with Anjou linen; figures of Christ on crosses four and a half feet high; pairs of brass candlesticks and snuffing scissors; an octagonal wooden tabernacle over six feet tall lined with gold leaf and its panels painted in oil with sacred likenesses; several large paintings framed in gold; a pall of red damask edged with brocade; vessels of tin, silver and copper for water and wine; and handbells for the consecration. He bestowed silver chalices lined with gold plating, and gold patens, and bound missals “recently revised,” and tin chrismatories, and processional candelabra of gilt wood, and choir books, and a brass lamp. For sanctuary floors he sent Turkish carpets. The Father President assigned vestments to the missions-chasubles, stoles, maniples, dalmatics and copes, of various materials: velvets from Granada and Valencia, brocades from Toledo, enriched with designs by the embroiderers whose craft came long before from the Netherlands; “small shirts of Chinese goods to be used as surplices” by altar boys; and for the friars albs and surplices of Rouen linen and lace. He gave them rosaries and breviaries and little iron molds in which to bake the wafers of the Host. For the towers he sent bronze bells, and for High Mass sets of musical instruments—flageolets, bassoons and trumpets; and incense, and wax, and four quires of paper, and oddments like a gross of little bells, and macaw feathers, and twelve bundles of glass beads, and ecclesiastical certificates on which to record the large stages of life, and twelve plowshares with steel edges to help all become self-sustaining on their riverside fields. The Father President’s catalog was a history in itself.
And when the mission was built and furnished it was both fortress and sanctuary. When outside its blind heavy walls a wind rose, there within were peace and security, where the many candle flames never wavered as they shone on flowers of colored paper. “It all looked very holy,” remarked a friar of such a church in 1634. And yet, if he knew Spain, and its sacred treasures, he perhaps looked upon his mud walls and his rough-chiselled timbers and bitterly told himself that here he had contrived no beauty or splendor, remembering such an altar vessel as the monstrance of Toledo that took nine years to fashion out of three hundred and thirty pounds of silver, until it was eight and a half feet high, with two hundred and sixty small statues amongst jewelled pillars, so that in its exposition the Blessed Sacrament appeared to hover in midair surrounded by a shining cloud. He could only say to himself that there was work to be done as well as possible with the materials at hand. Ending his day only to dedicate the morrow, he recited the prayer written by his founder Saint Francis that said “… grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; for it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.”
And when the morrow came, there were many tasks to guide. The convento and the church were staffed by Indians—a bell ringer, a cook, two or three sacristans, a porter, two boys who kept order in the friars’ cells, some women to grind corn, an old man who scratched at the beginnings of a garden within the clay walls of the patio. Without seeing themselves so, the Franciscan