lan, are now
reduced to mere heaps of rubbish, overgrown by cactus and bunches of low
grass. Most of the cave-dwellings have crumbled also. But the Rito
always remains a beautiful spot, lovely in its solitude, picturesque and
grand. About its ruins there hovers a charm which binds man to the place
where untold centuries ago man lived, loved, suffered, and died as
present generations live, suffer, and die in the course of human
history.

CHAPTER XX.

Sunshine and showers! A dingy blue sky is traversed by white, fleecy
clouds, long mares' tails, on whose border giant thunderclouds loom up,
sometimes drifting majestically along the horizon, or crowding upward to
spread, dissolve, and disappear in the zenith.

It is the rainy season in New Mexico, with its sporadic showers, its
peculiar sunlight, moments of scorching heat, and blasts of cool winds,
with thunder overhead. To the right and left rain falls in streaks, but
without sultriness, and with no danger from violent wind-storms or
cyclones. We are in the beginning of the month of September. It is warm,
but not oppressive, and the spot from which we view the scenery around
is high, open, and commands a wide extent of country.

We stand on a barren plateau. Lava-blocks are scattered about in
confusion, while tall arborescent cacti rise between them like
skeletons, and bunches of grass point upward here and there. North of us
the mesa expands in monotonous risings and swellings to the foot of a
tall, exceedingly graceful cone, whose slopes are dotted with bushes of
cedar and juniper. Beyond it are dark humps, denoting by their shape
that they are extinct craters. In the distance, west of that beautiful
cone, which to-day is called, and very appropriately, the Tetilla, the
sinuous profile of a mountain-chain just peeps over the bleak line
formed by the mesa and its various corrugations. Nestling within its
bosom rests the Rito de los Frijoles.

In the south, dense thunderclouds overhang massive peaks. Only the base
of the Sierra de Sandia, of the Old Placeres, and the numerous ranges
beyond, is visible, for a heavy shower falls in that direction. In the
east a plain sweeps into view, dotted by black specks looming up from a
reddish soil. This plain rises gently to the eastward, and abuts against
a tall mountain-range whose summits also are shrouded in massive clouds.

We stand on the bleak and wide mesa that interposes itself between the
town of Santa Fe and