d there
is a low, narrow ledge, or platform, opposite the doorway. There is
likewise in this room a small shelf in the left-hand wall. In _IV_
there is a raised platform on two adjacent sides of the square room,
and the doorway is an irregular orifice broken through the wall to the
open air.

Room _IV_ is a subterranean chamber, most of the floor of which is
littered with large fragments of rock which have fallen from the roof.
It has numerous small recesses in the wall resembling cubby-holes
where household utensils of various kinds were undoubtedly formerly
kept. This room is instructive, in that the entrance is partially
closed by two walls of masonry, which do not join. The stones are
laid in adobe in which fragments of pottery were detected. These
unjoined walls leave a doorway which is thus flanked on each side by
stone masonry, recalling in every particular the well-known walls of
cliff houses. Here, in fact, we have so close a resemblance to the
masonry of true cliff houses that we can hardly doubt that the
excavators of the cavate dwellings were, in reality, people similar to
those who built the cliff houses of Verde valley.

Room _VIII_ is a simple cave hewn out of the rock, with a chamber
behind it, entered by a passageway made of masonry, which partially
fills a larger opening. The doorway through this masonry is small
below, but broadens above in much the same manner as some of the
doorways in Tusayan of today.

Continuing along the left bank of the river, from the row of cavate
rooms, just described, on the first mesa, we round a promontory and
enter a small canyon,[17] which is perforated on each side with
numerous other cavate dwellings, large and small, all of the same
general character as the type described. Here, likewise, are small
external openings which evidently communicated with subterranean
chambers, but many of them are so elevated that access to them from
the floor of the canyon or from the cliff above is not possible. A
marked feature of the whole series is the existence here and there of
small, often inaccessible, stone cists of masonry plastered to the
side of the rocky cliff like swallows' nests.

All of these cists which are accessible had been opened and plundered
before my visit, but there yet remain a few which are still intact and
would repay examination and study. Similar walled-up cists are
likewise found, as we shall see later, in the cliff-houses of the
Red-rock country, hen