EL MORRO NATIONAL MONUMENT, N.M. — Graffiti has been an issue in the rugged vastness around here for centuries.

If you think that's a joke, you've never visited the 200-foot-high hunk of geology known as El Morro or, more aptly, Inscription Rock.

American Indians were cutting their symbols into the soft, light-hued sandstone of El Morro hundreds of years before Columbus was born.

Later, Spanish explorers and missionaries and U.S. soldiers and pioneers recorded news of their travels on this looming tablet 37 miles southwest of Grants. "Paso por aqui," or its English translation, "passed by here," was a favorite phrase.

It's been 400 years to the month since New Mexico's first governor, Don Juan de Onate, or perhaps one of his men carved a sentence into El Morro's tawny flank.

By 1906, when President Theodore Roosevelt designated it a national monument, about 1,000 separate inscriptions had been carved into El Morro, which simply means "headland" or "bluff."

Some inscriptions are as brief as a name and date.

Others — such as the missive written perhaps by New Mexico Gov. Don Juan de Eulate in 1620 — are long-winded and self-aggrandizing.

Some are crudely done.

Others — such as the 1857, or maybe it was 1859, signature by E. Pen Long — are so beautifully crafted they appear to have been done with a quill pen.

But the prize for the oldest non-Indian inscription — and arguably the most famous writing on the rock — goes to Onate.

In translation, it reads:

"Passed by here the Governor Don Juan de Onate, from the discovery of the Sea of the South on the 16th of April, 1605."

The words are written over an Indian petroglyph. You'd think that back in 1605, they could have found some empty space.

An emerald-green pool of cold water, screened by a thick growth of cattails, is cupped like sweet nectar in a natural, rock goblet at the base of El Morro. It looks inviting even to today's traveler, fortified as he or she is with air-conditioned motor transportation and a cooler of iced-down soft drinks.

Imagine what this pool must have seemed like to ancient Indians scratching survival from the desert, to Spanish conquistadors baking inside their ovens of armor, to citizens crossing this parched land in slow, creaky wagons headed for California.

This is not a spring but a pool fed by rain and melting snow. When full, the water hole can accommodate 12 feet and 200,000 gallons of water. Shaded by El Morro's bulk, it is always cool. And back in the day, it was the only water for 30 miles.