ted by substantial
cedar timbers, but only fragments of them remain. The roof, too, has
entirely disappeared, but the canopy of natural rock overhanging serves
to keep out the weather. The front rooms in both stories are the largest
and are most carefully finished. Perhaps they were the parlor and "best
bedroom" of some prehistoric housewife. They are plastered throughout
with fine smooth mortar, and even in that remote age the mania for
household decoration had a beginning: floor, walls, and ceiling were
colored a deep red, surrounded by a broad border of white.

The same cliff on which this house stands has on its side many other
ruins; some half destroyed by gradual decay, some crushed by falling
rocks, none so perfect as the one described; but all are crowded into
the strangest unapproachable crevices of the canyon-wall, like the
crannies which swallows choose to hold their nests, far removed from
the possibility of depredation. Some are so utterly inaccessible that
the explorers, with all their enthusiasm and activity, have never been
able to reach them. How any beings not endowed with wings could live at
such points it is hard to conceive: it makes one suspicious that the
Cliff-dwellers had not quite outgrown the habits of monkey ancestors.

As the canyon widens with the descent of the stream, the ruins in the
western wall increase in number. One fearful cliff a thousand feet in
height is chinked all over its face with tiny houses of one room each,
but only a few of them can be detected with the naked eye. One, which
was reached by an explorer at the peril of his life, stands intact:
ceiling and floor are of the natural rock, and the wall is built in a
neat curve conforming to the shape of the ledge.

A mile farther down the stream there is a most interesting group of
houses. Eight hundred feet above the valley there is a shelf in the
cliff sixty feet in length that is quite covered by a house. The
building contains four large rooms, a circular sacred apartment and
smaller rooms of irregular shape. It was called by its discoverers "The
House of the Sixteen Windows." Behind this house the cliff-side rises
smooth and perpendicular thirty feet, but it can be scaled by an ancient
stairway cut into it which ascends to a still higher ledge. The stairs
lead to the very door of another house filling a niche a hundred and
twenty feet long. A great canopy of solid rock overarches the little
fortress, reaching far forward