The Cliff-Dwellers

i7|0 more instructive, more fascinating', wonders of the Interior West are found than the remains of the Cliff-dwellers. Of these ancient people, the years have left for our seeing' both that which was their handiwork and themselves. The sands have covered deeply the floors of their caves, have preserved and yielded up to our day that which their art produced, and that which was mortal of them. We see the articles of domestic life and the implements of war; we look upon their bodies after the lapse of we know not how many centuries. And there, upon the cliff-tops, upon the steep sides of wild and desolate canyons, in sun-burnt lands, are yet the walls of their dwellings, their watch-towers, and their excavations in the solid rock, their kivas, their places of counsel, and their scenes of worship. The imagination is excited by the very stillness, the solitude, that now rests over the ruined buildings of the Cliff-dwellers. That building, that cave, in the Canyon Del Muerte ? What wild scenes have been there enacted ! Up that slope, beneath those walls, to that opening in the rock, what strange processions ! One imagines the white-haired priests, the fantastic warriors, the dark-skinned, black-haired maidens ! Those rocks have echoed back, no doubt, the shrill songs of joyance, and the weird chants of lamentation. Perhaps there, too, might have been enacted some scene of carnage, some massacre, when the life of that primitive tribe was brought to an end. — Alfred Lambourne.