and smoke his pipe by the kitchen stove and talk to Thea
about them. He had never found any one before who was interested in his
ruins. Every Sunday the old man prowled about in the canyon, and he had
come to know a good deal more about it than he could account for. He had
gathered up a whole chestful of Cliff-Dweller relics which he meant to
take back to Germany with him some day. He taught Thea how to find
things among the ruins: grinding-stones, and drills and needles made of
turkey-bones. There were fragments of pottery everywhere. Old Henry
explained to her that the Ancient People had developed masonry and
pottery far beyond any other crafts. After they had made houses for
themselves, the next thing was to house the precious water. He explained
to her how all their customs and ceremonies and their religion went back
to water. The men provided the food, but water was the care of the
women. The stupid women carried water for most of their lives; the
cleverer ones made the vessels to hold it. Their pottery was their most
direct appeal to water, the envelope and sheath of the precious element
itself. The strongest Indian need was expressed in those graceful jars,
fashioned slowly by hand, without the aid of a wheel.

When Thea took her bath at the bottom of the canyon, in the sunny pool
behind the screen of cottonwoods, she sometimes felt as if the water
must have sovereign qualities, from having been the object of so much
service and desire. That stream was the only living thing left of the
drama that had been played out in the canyon centuries ago. In the
rapid, restless heart of it, flowing swifter than the rest, there was a
continuity of life that reached back into the old time. The glittering
thread of current had a kind of lightly worn, loosely knit personality,
graceful and laughing. Thea's bath came to have a ceremonial gravity.
The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic.

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water
between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through
her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water
had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken
pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in
which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is
life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to
stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in the