of yellow rocks baking in sunlight, the swallows,
the cedar smell, and that peculiar sadness--a voice out of the past, not
very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude
eternally.

Standing up in her lodge, Thea could with her thumb nail dislodge flakes
of carbon from the rock roof--the cooking-smoke of the Ancient People.
They were that near! A timid, nest-building folk, like the swallows. How
often Thea remembered Ray Kennedy's moralizing about the cliff cities.
He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or
the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say,
too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best. On the first
day that Thea climbed the water trail she began to have intuitions about
the women who had worn the path, and who had spent so great a part of
their lives going up and down it. She found herself trying to walk as
they must have walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins
which she had never known before,--which must have come up to her out of
the accustomed dust of that rocky trail. She could feel the weight of an
Indian baby hanging to her back as she climbed.

The empty houses, among which she wandered in the afternoon, the
blanketed one in which she lay all morning, were haunted by certain
fears and desires; feelings about warmth and cold and water and physical
strength. It seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those old
people came up to her out of the rock shelf on which she lay; that
certain feelings were transmitted to her, suggestions that were simple,
insistent, and monotonous, like the beating of Indian drums. They were
not expressible in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves into
attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or relaxation; the
naked strength of youth, sharp as the sunshafts; the crouching
timorousness of age, the sullenness of women who waited for their
captors. At the first turning of the canyon there was a half-ruined
tower of yellow masonry, a watch-tower upon which the young men used to
entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes for a whole morning
Thea could see the coppery breast and shoulders of an Indian youth there
against the sky; see him throw the net, and watch the struggle with the
eagle.

Old Henry Biltmer, at the ranch, had been a great deal among the Pueblo
Indians who are the descendants of the Cliff-Dwellers. After supper he
used to sit