IV

BLAKE and I got over to the mesa together for the first time early in

May. We carried with us all the food we could, and an ax and spade. It

took us several days to find a trail leading from the bottom of the box

canyon up to the Cliff City. There were gaps in it; it was broken by

ledges too steep for a man to climb. Lying beside one of these, we found

an old dried cedar trunk, with toe-notches cut in it. That was a plain

suggestion. We felled some trees and threw them up over the gaps in the

path. Toward the end of the week, when our provisions were getting low,

we made the last lap in our climb, and stepped upon the ledge that was

the floor of the Cliff City.

In front of the cluster of buildings, there was an open space, like a

court-yard. Along the outer edge of this yard ran a low stone wall. In

some places the wall had fallen away from the weather, but the buildings

themselves sat so far back under the rim rock that the rain had never

beat on them. In thunder-storms I’ve seen the water come down in sheets

over the face of that cavern without a drop touching the village.

The court-yard was not choked by vegetation, for there was no soil. It

was bare rock, with a few old, flat-topped cedars growing out of the

cracks, and a little pale grass. But everything seemed open and clean,

and the stones, I remember, were warm to the touch, smooth and pleasant

to feel.

The outer walls of the houses were intact, except where sometimes an

outjutting corner had crumbled. They were made of dressed stones,

plastered inside and out with ’dobe, and were tinted in light colours,

pink and pale yellow and tan. Here and there a cedar log in the ceiling

had given way and let the second-story chamber down into the first;

except for that, there was little rubbish or disorder. As Blake

remarked, wind and sun are good housekeepers.

This village had never been sacked by an enemy, certainly. Inside the

little rooms water jars and bowls stood about unbroken, and yucca-fibre

mats were on the floors.

We could give only a hurried look over the place, as our food was

exhausted, and we had to get back over the river before dark. We went

about softly, tried not to disturb anything--even the silence. Besides

the tower, there seemed to be about thirty little separate dwellings.

Behind the cluster of houses was a kind of back court-yard, running from

end to end of the cavern; a long, low, twilit space that got gradually

lower toward the back until the rim rock met the floor of the cavern,

exactly like the sloping roof of an attic. There was perpetual twilight

back there, cool, shadowy, very grateful after the blazing sun in the

front court-yard. When we entered it we heard a soft trickling sound,

and we came upon a spring that welled out of the rock into a stone basin

and then ran off through a cobble-lined gutter and dripped down the

cliffs. I’ve never anywhere tasted water like it; as cold as ice, and so

pure. Long afterward Father Duchene came out to spend a week with us on

the mesa; he always carried a small drinking-glass with him, and he used

to fill it at the spring and take it out into the sunlight. The water

looked like liquid crystal, absolutely colourless, without the slight

brownish or greenish tint that water nearly always has. It threw off the

sunlight like a diamond.

Beside this spring stood some of the most beautifully shaped water jars

we ever found--I gave Mrs. St. Peter one of them--standing there just as

if they’d been left yesterday. In the back court we found a great many

things besides jars and bowls: a row of grinding-stones, and several

clay ovens, very much like those the Mexicans use to-day. There were

charred bones and charcoal, and the roof was thick with soot all the way

along. It was evidently a kind of common kitchen, where they roasted and

baked and probably gossiped. There were corncobs everywhere, and ears of

corn with the kernels still on them--little, like popcorn. We found

dried beans, too, and strings of pumpkin seeds, and plum seeds, and a

cupboard full of little implements made of turkey bones.

Late that afternoon Roddy and I crossed the river and got back to our

cabin to rest for a few days.

The second time we went over, we found a long winding trail leading from

the Cliff City up to the top of the mesa--a narrow path worn deep into

the stone ledges that overhung the village, then running back into the

wood of stunted piñons on the summit. Following this to the north end

of the mesa, we found what was left of an old road down to the plain.

But making this road passable was a matter of weeks, and we had to get

workmen and tools from Tarpin. It was a narrow foot-path, barely wide

enough for a sure-footed mule, and it wound down through Black Canyon,

dropping in loops along the face of terrifying cliffs. About a hundred

feet above the river, it ended--broke right off into the air. A wall of

rock had fallen away there, probably from a landslide. That last piece

of road cost us three weeks’ hard work, and most of our winter’s wages.

We kept the workmen on long enough to build us a tight log cabin on the

mesa top, a little way back from the ledge that hung over the Cliff

City.

While we were engaged in road-building, we made a short cut from our

cabin down to the Cliff City and Cow Canyon. Just over the Cliff City,

there was a crack in the ledge, a sort of manhole, and in this we hung a

ladder of pine-trunks spliced together with light chains, leaving the

branch forks for footholds. By climbing down this ladder we saved about

two miles of winding trail, and dropped almost directly into Cow Canyon,

where we meant always to leave one of the horses grazing. Taking this

route, we could at any time make a quick exit from the mesa--we were

used to swimming the river now, and in summer our wet clothes dried very

quickly.

Bill Hook, the liveryman at Tarpin, who’d sheltered old Henry when he

was down and out, proved a good friend to us. He got our workmen back

and forth for us, brought our supplies up on to the mesa on his

pack-mules, and when one of us had to stay in town overnight he let us

sleep in his hay barn to save a hotel bill. He knew our expenses were

heavy, and did everything for us at a bottom price.

By the first of July our money was nearly gone, but we had our road

made, and our cabin built on top of the mesa. We brought old Henry up by

the new horse-trail and began housekeeping. We were now ready for what

we called excavating. We built wide shelves all around our

sleeping-room, and there we put the smaller articles we found in the

Cliff City. We numbered each specimen, and in my day-book I wrote down

just where and in what condition we had found it, and what we thought it

had been used for. I’d got a merchant’s ledger in Tarpin, and every

night after supper, while Roddy read the newspapers, I sat down at the

kitchen table and wrote up an account of the day’s work.

Henry, besides doing the housekeeping, was very eager to help us in the

“rew-ins,” as he called them. He was more patient than we, and would dig

with his fingers half a day to get a pot out of a rubbish pile without

breaking it. After all, the old man had a wider knowledge of the world

than either of us, and it often came in handy. When we were working in a

pale pink house, with two stories, and a sort of balcony before the

upper windows, we came on a closet in the wall of the upstairs room; in

this were a number of curious things, among them a deer-skin bag full of

little tools. Henry said at once they were surgical instruments; a stone

lancet, a bunch of fine bone needles, wooden forceps, and a catheter.

One thing we knew about these people; they hadn’t built their town in a

hurry. Everything proved their patience and deliberation. The cedar

joists had been felled with stone axes and rubbed smooth with sand. The

little poles that lay across them and held up the clay floor of the

chamber above, were smoothly polished. The door lintels were carefully

fitted (the doors were stone slabs held in place by wooden bars fitted

into hasps). The clay dressing that covered the stone walls was tinted,

and some of the chambers were frescoed in geometrical patterns, one

colour laid on another. In one room was a painted border, little tents,

like Indian tepees, in brilliant red.

But the really splendid thing about our city, the thing that made it

delightful to work there, and must have made it delightful to live

there, was the setting. The town hung like a bird’s nest in the cliff,

looking off into the box canyon below, and beyond into the wide valley

we called Cow Canyon, facing an ocean of clear air. A people who had the

hardihood to build there, and who lived day after day looking down upon

such grandeur, who came and went by those hazardous trails, must have

been, as we often told each other, a fine people. But what had become of

them? What catastrophe had overwhelmed them?

They hadn’t moved away, for they had taken none of their belongings, not

even their clothes. Oh, yes, we found clothes; yucca moccasins, and what

seemed like cotton cloth, woven in black and white. Never any wool, but

sheepskins tanned with the fleece on them. They may have been mountain

sheep; the mesa was full of them. We talked of shooting one for meat,

but we never did. When a mountain sheep comes out on a ledge hundreds of

feet above you, with his trumpet horns, there’s something noble about

him--he looks like a priest. We didn’t want to shoot at them and make

them shy. We liked to see them. We shot a wild cow when we wanted fresh

meat.

At last we came upon one of the original inhabitants--not a skeleton,

but a dried human body, a woman. She was not in the Cliff City; we found

her in a little group of houses stuck up in a high arch we called the

Eagle’s Nest. She was lying on a yucca mat, partly covered with rags,

and she had dried into a mummy in that water-drinking air. We thought

she had been murdered; there was a great wound in her side, the ribs

stuck out through the dried flesh. Her mouth was open as if she were

screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of

terrible agony. Part of the nose was gone, but she had plenty of teeth,

not one missing, and a great deal of coarse black hair. Her teeth were

even and white, and so little worn that we thought she must have been a

young woman. Henry named her Mother Eve, and we called her that. We put

her in a blanket and let her down with great care, and kept her in a

chamber in the Cliff City.

Yes, we found three other bodies, but afterward. One day, working in the

Cliff City, we came upon a stone slab at one end of the cavern, that

seemed to lead straight into the rock. It was set in cement, and when we

loosened it we found it opened into a small, dark chamber. In this there

had been a platform, of fine cedar poles laid side by side, but it had

crumbled. In the wreckage were three bodies, one man and two women,

wrapped in yucca-fibre, all in the same posture and apparently prepared

for burial. They were the bodies of old people. We believed they were

among the aged who were left behind when the tribe went down to live on

their farms in the summer season; that they had died in the absence of

the villagers, and were put into this mortuary chamber to await the

return of the tribe, when they would have their funeral rites. Probably

these people burned their dead. Of course an archæologist could have

told a great deal about that civilization from those bodies. But they

never got to an archaælogist--at least, not on this side of the world.

V

THE first of August came, and everything was going well with us. We

hadn’t met with any bad luck, and though we had very little money left,

there was Blake’s untouched savings account in the bank at Pardee, and

we had plenty of credit in Tarpin. The merchants there took an interest

and were friendly. But the little new moon, that looked so innocent,

brought us trouble. We lost old Henry, and in a terrible way. From the

first we’d been a little bothered by rattlesnakes--you generally find

them about old stone quarries and old masonry. We had got them pretty

well cleared out of the Cliff City, hadn’t seen one there for weeks. But

one Sunday we took Henry and went on an exploring expedition at the

north end of the mesa, along Black Canyon. We caught sight of a little

bunch of ruins we’d never noticed before, and made a foolhardy scramble

to get up to them. We almost made it, and then there was a stretch of

rock wall so smooth we couldn’t climb it without a ladder. I was the

tallest of the three, and Henry was the lightest; he thought he could

get up there if he stood on my shoulders. He was standing on my back,

his head just above the floor of the cavern, groping for something to

hoist himself by, when a snake struck him from the ledge--struck him

square in the forehead. It happened in a flash. He came down and brought

the snake with him. By the time we picked him up and turned him over,

his face had begun to swell. In ten minutes it was purple, and he was so

crazy it took the two of us to hold him and keep him from jumping down

the chasm. He was struck so near the brain that there was nothing to do.

It lasted nearly two hours. Then we carried him home. Roddy dropped down

the ladder into Cow Canyon, caught his horse, and rode into Tarpin for

the coroner. Father Duchene was preaching there at the mission church

that Sunday, and came back with him.

We buried Henry on the mesa. Father Duchene stayed on with us a week to

keep us company. We were so cut up that we were almost ready to quit.

But he had been planning to come out to see our find for a long while,

and he got our minds off our trouble. He worked hard every day. He went

over everything we’d done, and examined everything minutely: the

pottery, cloth, stone implements, and the remains of food. He measured

the heads of the mummies and declared they had good skulls. He cut down

one of the old cedars that grew exactly in the middle of the deep trail

worn in the stone, and counted the rings under his pocket microscope.

You couldn’t count them with the unassisted eye, for growing out of a

tiny crevice in the rock as that tree did, the increase of each year was

so scant that the rings were invisible except with a glass. The tree he

cut down registered three hundred and thirty-six years’ growth, and it

could have begun to grow in that well-worn path only after human feet

had ceased to come and go there.

Why had they ceased? That question puzzled him, too. Smallpox, any

epidemic, would have left unburied bodies. Father Duchene suggested what

Dr. Ripley, in Washington, afterward surmised: that the tribe had been

exterminated, not here in their stronghold, but in their summer camp,

down among the farms across the river. Father Duchene had been among the

Indians nearly twenty years then, he had seventeen Indian pueblos in his

parish, and he spoke several Indian dialects. He was able to explain the

use of many of the implements we found, especially those used in

religious ceremonies. The night before he left us, he summed up the

results of his week’s study, something like this:

“The two square towers on the mesa top, to which you have given little

attention, were unquestionably granaries. Under the stones and earth

fallen from the walls, there is a quantity of dried corn on the ear. Not

a great harvest, for life must have come to an end here in the summer,

when the new crop was not yet garnered and the last year’s grain was

getting low. The semicircular ridge on the mesa top, which you can see

distinctly among the piñons when the sun is low and brings it into high

relief, is the buried wall of an amphitheatre, where probably religious

exercises and games took place. I advise you not to dig into it. It is

probably the most important thing here, and should be left for scholars

to excavate.

“The tower you so much admire in the cliff village may have been a watch

tower, as you think, but from the curious placing of those narrow slits,

like windows, I believe it was used for astronomical observations. I am

inclined to think that your tribe were a superior people. Perhaps they

were not so when they first came upon this mesa, but in an orderly and

secure life they developed considerably the arts of peace. There is

evidence on every hand that they lived for something more than food and

shelter. They had an appreciation of comfort, and went even further than

that. Their life, compared to that of our roving Navajos, must have been

quite complex. There is unquestionably a distinct feeling for design in

what you call the Cliff City. Buildings are not grouped like that by

pure accident, though convenience probably had much to do with it.

Convenience often dictates very sound design.

“The workmanship on both the wood and stone of the dwellings is good.

The shapes and decoration of the water jars and food bowls is better

than in any of the existing pueblos I know, better even than the pottery

made at Acoma. I have seen a collection of early pottery from the island

of Crete. Many of the geometrical decorations on these jars are not only

similar, but, if my memory is trustworthy, identical.

“I see your tribe as a provident, rather thoughtful people, who made

their livelihood secure by raising crops and fowl--the great number of

turkey bones and feathers are evidence that they had domesticated the

wild turkey. With grain in their store-rooms, and mountain sheep and

deer for their quarry, they rose gradually from the condition of

savagery. With the proper variation of meat and vegetable diet, they

developed physically and improved in the primitive arts. They had looms

and mills, and experimented with dyes. At the same time, they possibly

declined in the arts of war, in brute strength and ferocity.

“I see them here, isolated, cut off from other tribes, working out their

destiny, making their mesa more and more worthy to be a home for man,

purifying life by religious ceremonies and observances, caring

respectfully for their dead, protecting the children, doubtless

entertaining some feelings of affection and sentiment for this

stronghold where they were at once so safe and so comfortable, where

they had practically overcome the worst hardships that primitive man had

to fear. They were, perhaps, too far advanced for their time and

environment.

“They were probably wiped out, utterly exterminated, by some roving

Indian tribe without culture or domestic virtues, some horde that fell

upon them in their summer camp and destroyed them for their hides and

clothing and weapons, or from mere love of slaughter. I feel sure that

these brutal invaders never even learned of the existence of this mesa,

honeycombed with habitations. If they had come here, they would have

destroyed. They killed and went their way.

“What I cannot understand is why you have not found more human remains.

The three bodies you found in the mortuary chamber were prepared for

burial by the old people who were left behind. But what of the last

survivors? It is possible that when autumn wore on, and no one returned

from the farms, the aged banded together, went in search of their

people, and perished in the plain.

“Like you, I feel a reverence for this place. Wherever humanity has made

that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a

sacred spot. Your people were cut off here without the influence of

example or emulation, with no incentive but some natural yearning for

order and security. They built themselves into this mesa and humanized

it.”

Father Duchene warmly agreed with Blake that I ought to go to Washington

and make some report to the Government, so that the proper specialists

would be sent out to study the remains we had found.

“You must go to the Director of the Smithsonian Institution,” he said.

“He will send us an archæologist who will interpret all that is obscure

to us. He will revive this civilization in a scholarly work. It may be

that you will have thrown light on some important points in the history

of your country.”

After he left us, Blake and I began to make definite plans for my trip

to Washington. Blake was to work on the railroad that winter and save as

much money as possible. The expense of my journey would be paid out of

what we called the jack-pot account, in the bank at Pardee. All our

further expenses on the mesa would be paid by the Government. Roddy

often hinted that we would get a substantial reward of some kind. When

we broke or lost anything at our work, he used to smile and say: “Never

mind. I guess our Uncle Sam will make that good to us.”

We had a beautiful autumn that year, soft, sunny, like a dream. Even up

there in the air we had so little wind that the gold hung on the poplars

and quaking aspens late in November. We stayed out on the mesa until

after Christmas. We wanted our archæologist, when he came, to find

everything in good order. We cleared up any litter we’d made in digging

things out, stored all the specimens, even the mummies, in our cabin,

and padlocked the doors and windows before we left it. I had written up

my day-book carefully to the very end, had even written out some of

Father Duchene’s deductions. This book I left in concealment on the

mesa. I climbed up to the Eagle’s Nest in which we had found the mummy

of the murdered woman we called Mother Eve, where I had noticed a

particularly neat little cupboard in the wall. I put my book in this

niche and sealed it up with cement. Mother Eve had greatly interested

Father Duchene, by the way. He laughed and said she was well named. He

didn’t believe her death could throw any light on the destruction of her

people. “I seem to smell,” he said slyly, “a personal tragedy. Perhaps

when the tribe went down to the summer camp, our lady was sick and would

not go. Perhaps her husband thought it worth while to return unannounced

from the farms some night, and found her in improper company. The young

man may have escaped. In primitive society the husband is allowed to

punish an unfaithful wife with death.”

When the first snow began to fly, we said good-bye to our mesa and rode

into Tarpin. It took several days to outfit me for my journey to

Washington. We bought a trunk (I’d never owned one in my life), and a

supply of white shirts, an overcoat that was as heavy as lead and just

about as cold, and two suits of clothes. That conscienceless trader

worked off on me a clawhammer coat he must have had in stock for twenty

years. He easily persuaded Roddy that it was the proper thing for dress

occasions. I think Roddy expected that I would be received by

ambassadors--perhaps I did.

Roddy drew six hundred dollars out of the bank to stake me, and bought

my ticket and Pullman through to Washington. He went to the station with

me the morning I left, and a hard handshake was good-bye.

For a long while after my train pulled out, I could see our mesa bulking

up blue on the sky-line. I hated to leave it, but I reflected that it

had taken care of itself without me for a good many hundred years. When

I saw it again, I told myself, I would have done my duty by it; I would

bring back with me men who would understand it, who would appreciate it

and dig out all its secrets.