ors.

The sunset fades. The shadows come down like invisible wings. The
twilight deepens. The stars prick through the indigo blue of a desert
sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern
window and door the deep red of juniper and cedar log glow in the
fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his
plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the
big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a
metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a
bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing
floors in the middle of the narrow canyon. You can see the dancing rings
yet, where the feet of a thousand years have beaten the raw earth hard.
Men only dance. These are not sex dances. They are dances of thanks to
the gods for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases
clapping. The campfires that scent the canyon with juniper smells,
flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance
ceases and fades in the darkness.

That was ten thousand years agone. Where are the races that danced to
the beat of the priest's clapper gong?

I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail
of the turtle dove; and there came back that old prophecy--it used to
give me cold shivers down my spine as a child--that the habitat of the
races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and
bat and fox.

* * * * *

I don't know what reason there is for it, neither do the Indians of the
Southwest know; but Casa Grande, the Great House, or the Place of the
Morning Glow, is to them the Garden of Eden of their race traditions;
the scene of their mythical "golden age," when there were no Apaches
raiding the crops, nor white men stealing land away; when life was a
perpetual Happy Hunting Ground, only the hunters didn't kill, and all
animals could talk, and the Desert was an antelope plain knee-deep in
pasturage and flowers, and the springs were all full of running water.

Casa Grande is undoubtedly the oldest of all the prehistoric ruins in
the United States. It lies some eighteen to twenty-five miles, according
to the road you follow, south of the station called by that name on the
Southern Pacific Railroad. It isn't supposed to rain in the desert after
the two summer months, nor to blow dust storms after March; but it was