ridge springs from the valley, nosing northward.

No sound breaks the stillness of the day. From the higher ridges the
eye falls upon the pallid ghost of the city. Blotches of juniper
relieve the monotony of the brown, lifeless grass. Grays fade into
leaden hues, to be absorbed in the ashy, indeterminate colors of the
sun-soaked plains. No fitter setting for a superstition could be
found. Once a town of fifteen hundred inhabitants, the topography of
ridge gave it an unusual shape. Ruins of three four-story terrace
houses face one another across narrow alleys. Six circular cisterns
yawn amid mounds of fallen walls. At the center of the southerly
blocks towers a gray quadrangular wall, the last of a large building.
At the western terminus of the village, where the slope falls away to
the valley, is a gigantic ruin. Its walls are thirty feet high and six
feet thick. The roof has fallen, and the topmost layers of the
bluish-gray limestone are ragged and time-worn.

The building had a frontage of two hundred and two feet, and its
greatest depth was one hundred thirty-one feet. Flat-faced prisms,
firmly laid in adobe mortar, are placed at irregular intervals in the
walls.

The northern part of the ruin is one great cross-shaped room,
thirty-eight feet wide and one hundred and thirty-one feet long. A gate
fifteen feet wide and eleven feet high opens to the eastward. A mighty
timber forms an arch supporting fifteen feet of solid masonry.

South of this is a great chamber cut up into smaller rooms, with long
halls, with walls twenty feet in height. In one of the rooms is a
fireplace, and over the doorways are carved wood lintels. An entrance
from the south is given through a spacious antechamber. The rafters,
hauled fifteen miles, must have weighed a ton.

Here lies the Colchis of the modern Argonaut. At first the Mexican
pried through the debris-choked rooms, or feebly tunneled under the
walls. With the coming of the white races and the drill, holes have
been sunk into the original bed-rock. To the simple stories of the
natives, fable-bearers have added maps, dying confessions, and
discovered ciphers.

This ruin, which has caused so many heart-breaks and disappointments,
are but the fragments of an old mission founded by Francisco de Atevedo
in 1628. Tabiri was to be the central mission of Abo and Cuarac. The
absence of water leads the modern explorer to believe that when the
town was deserted the spr