phere in shape. Where the curve of the roof met the curve from the
bottom a little projecting bench had been utilized as a foundation for a
row of houses.

Illustration of Cave-Town.------------------

The little community that built their houses here seem to have practised
all the industries of a savage life. In one place there was evidence
that on that spot had been carried on the manufacture of stone
implements. At another place holes had been drilled, as if for a loom.
In the main building there were fourteen rooms or apartments, ranging
from sixteen to nine feet in width. "In the central room of the main
building we found a circular, basin-like depression, that had served as
a fireplace, being still filled with the ashes and cinders of aboriginal
fires, the surrounding walls being blackened with smoke and soot. This
room was undoubtedly the kitchen of the house. Some of the smaller rooms
appear to have been used for the same purpose, the fires having been
made in the corner against the back wall, the smoke escaping overhead.
The masonry displayed in the construction of the walls is very
creditable. A symmetrical curve is preserved throughout the whole line,
and every portion perfectly plumb. The subdivisions are at right angles
to the front. The whole appearance of the place and its surroundings
indicate that the family or little community who inhabited it were in
good circumstances, and the lords of the surrounding country. Looking
out from one of their houses, with a great dome of solid rock
overhead that echoed and re-echoed every word uttered with marvelous
distinctness, and below them a steep descent of one hundred feet to the
broad, fertile valley of the Rio San Juan, covered with waving fields of
maize and scattered groves of majestic cotton-woods, these old people,
whom even the imagination can hardly clothe with reality, must have felt
a sense of security that even the incursions of their barbarian foes
could hardly have disturbed."<21>

To describe the defensive ruins on Epsom Creek, Montezuma Creek, and
the McElmo is simply to repeat descriptions already given. We meet with
cave-houses, cliff-houses, and sentinel-towers in abundance. The whole
section appears to have been thickly settled. Further explorations will
doubtless make known many more ruins, but probably nothing differing in
kind from what is already known. We think the defensive ruins belong
to a later period of their existence than do t