there are alcoves
in the solid wall, where meal was stored; and of water jars, urns,
ollas, there are remnants and whole pieces galore. It is thought these
people used not only yucca fiber for weaving, but some species of hemp
and cotton; for there are tatters and strips of what might have been
cotton or linen. You see it wrapped round the bodies of the mummies and
come on it in the accumulation of volcanic ash.

Near many of the ruins is a huge empty basin or pit, which must have
been used as a reservoir in which waters were impounded during siege of
war. Like conies of the rocks, or beehives of modern skyscrapers, these
denizens lived. The most of the mummies have been found in sealed up
chambers at the backs of the main houses; but these could hardly have
been general burying places, for comparatively few mummies have yet been
found. Who, then, were these dwarf mummies, placed in sealed vaults to
the rear of the Gila caves? Perhaps a favorite father, brother, or
sister; perhaps a governor of the tribe, who perished during siege and
could not be taken out to the common burial ground.

Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to 700 feet high,
literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave
doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-canyons in the Southwest are
of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and
gypsum white. Owing to the great altitude--some of the ruins are 9,000
feet above sea level, 1,000 above valley bottom--the atmosphere has that
curious quality of splitting white light into its seven prismatic hues.
Artists of the Southwestern School account for this by the fact of
desert dust being a silt fine as flour, which acts like crystal or glass
in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this
hardly explains these high box-canyons, for there is no dust here. My own
theory (please note, it is only a theory and may be quite wrong) is that
the air is so rare at altitudes above 6,000 feet, so rare and pure that
it splits light up, if not in seven prismatic colors, then in elementary
colors that give the reds and purples and fire tints predominance.
Anyway, at sunset and sunrise, these box-canyons literally swim in a
glory of lavender and purple and fiery reds. You almost fancy it is a
fire where you can dip your hand and not be burned; a sea in which
spirits, not bodies, swim and move and have their being; a sea of fiery
rainbow col