; a
darksome, eerie place with _sipapu_--the holes in the floor--for the
mystic Earth Spirit to come out for the guidance of his people. Don't
smile at that idea of an Earth Spirit! What do we tell a man, who has
driven his nerves too hard in town?--To go back to the Soil and let Dame
Nature pour her invigorating energies into him! That's what the Earth
Spirit, the Great Earth Magician, signified to these people.

* * * * *

Curious how geology and archaeology agree on the rise and evanishment of
these people. Geology says that as the ice invasion advanced, the
northern races were forced south and south till the Stone Age folk
living in the roofless City of the Dead on the floor of the valley were
forced to take refuge from them in the caves hollowed out of the cliff.
That was any time between 20,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C. Archaeology says as
the Utes and the Navajo and the Apache--Asthapascan stock--came ramping
from the North, the Stone Men were driven from the valleys to the
inaccessible cliffs and mesa table lands. "It was not until the nomadic
robbers forced the pueblos that the Southwestern people adopted the
crowded form of existence," says Archaeology. Sounds like an explanation
of our modern skyscrapers and the real estate robbers of modern life,
doesn't it?

Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men
were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse.
Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for
thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the canyon, and
the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and
Zuni have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of
corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe.
Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region--"place of the bird
people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years
before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people
dispersed.

* * * * *

What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part
of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petrae, or amid the sand-covered columns
of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging
excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in
the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be--well,
just _au fait_, if you didn't