until it was like a deep groove
running along the sides of the canyon. In this hollow (like a great fold
in the rock) the Ancient People had built their houses of yellowish
stone and mortar. The over-hanging cliff above made a roof two hundred
feet thick. The hard stratum below was an everlasting floor. The houses
stood along in a row, like the buildings in a city block, or like a
barracks.

In both walls of the canyon the same streak of soft rock had been washed
out, and the long horizontal groove had been built up with houses. The
dead city had thus two streets, one set in either cliff, facing each
other across the ravine, with a river of blue air between them.

The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these two streets went on
for four miles or more, interrupted by the abrupt turnings of the gorge,
but beginning again within each turn. The canyon had a dozen of these
false endings near its head. Beyond, the windings were larger and less
perceptible, and it went on for a hundred miles, too narrow,
precipitous, and terrible for man to follow it. The Cliff Dwellers liked
wide canyons, where the great cliffs caught the sun. Panther Canyon had
been deserted for hundreds of years when the first Spanish missionaries
came into Arizona, but the masonry of the houses was still wonderfully
firm; had crumbled only where a landslide or a rolling boulder had torn
it.

All the houses in the canyon were clean with the cleanness of sun-baked,
wind-swept places, and they all smelled of the tough little cedars that
twisted themselves into the very doorways. One of these rock-rooms Thea
took for her own. Fred had told her how to make it comfortable. The day
after she came old Henry brought over on one of the pack-ponies a roll
of Navajo blankets that belonged to Fred, and Thea lined her cave with
them. The room was not more than eight by ten feet, and she could touch
the stone roof with her finger-tips. This was her old idea: a nest in a
high cliff, full of sun. All morning long the sun beat upon her cliff,
while the ruins on the opposite side of the canyon were in shadow. In
the afternoon, when she had the shade of two hundred feet of rock wall,
the ruins on the other side of the gulf stood out in the blazing
sunlight. Before her door ran the narrow, winding path that had been the
street of the Ancient People. The yucca and niggerhead cactus grew
everywhere. From her doorstep she looked out on the ocher-colored slope
that ran