eyes, they were at the base of the walls of a fortress. A confused,
general murmur broke forth of "Ruins! Pueblos! Casas Grandes! Casas de
Montezuma!"

The architecture, unlike that of Tegua, but similar to that of the ruins
of the Gila, was of adobes. Large cakes of mud, four or five feet long and
two feet thick, had been moulded in cases, dried in the sun, and laid in
regular courses to the height of twenty feet. Centuries (perhaps) of
exposure to weather had so cracked, guttered, and gnawed this destructible
material, that at a distance the pile looked not unlike the natural
monuments which fire and water have builded in this enchanted land, and
had therefore not been recognized by the travellers as human handiwork.

What they now saw was a rampart which ran along the brow of the bluff for
several hundred yards. Originally twenty feet high, it had been so
fissured by the rains and crumbled by the winds, that it resembled a
series of peaks united here and there in a plane surface. Some of the gaps
reached nearly to the ground, and through these it could be seen that the
wall was five feet across, a single adobe forming the entire thickness.
All along the base the dampness of the earth had eaten away the clay, so
that in many places the structure was tottering to its fall.

Filing to the left a few yards, the emigrants found a deep fissure through
which the animals stumbled one by one over mounds of crumbled adobes.
Thurstane, entering last, looked around him in wonder. He was inside a
quadrilateral enclosure, apparently four hundred yards in length by two
hundred and fifty in breadth, the walls throughout being the same mass of
adobe work, fissured, jagged, gray, solemn, and in their utter
solitariness sublime.

But this was not the whole ruin; the fortress had a citadel. In one corner
of the enclosure stood a tower-like structure, forty-five or fifty feet
square and thirty in altitude, surmounted on its outer angle by a smaller
tower, also four-sided, which rose some twelve or fourteen feet higher. It
was not isolated, but built into an angle of the outer rampart, so as to
form with it one solid mass of fortification. The material was adobe; but,
unlike the other ruins, it was in good condition; some species of roofing
had preserved the walls from guttering; not a crevice deformed their gray,
blank, dreary faces.

Instinctively and without need of command the emigrants had pushed on
toward this edifice. It was