own in the illustration.

It is also quite common to see a frame work of only two upright poles
connected with a horizontal beam, against which boards are leaning
from both sides, making the house look like a gable roof set on the
ground. There are, however, always one or more logs laid horizontally
and overhung by the low eaves of the roof, while the front and rear
are carelessly filled in with boards or logs, either horizontally or
standing on ends. In the hot country this style of house may be seen
thatched with palm-leaves, or with grass.

The dwelling may also consist only of a roof resting on four
uprights (_jacal_); or it may be a mere shed. There are also regular
log-cabins encountered with locked corners, especially among the
southern Tarahumares. Finally, when a Tarahumare becomes civilised,
he builds himself a house of stone and mud, with a roof of boards,
or thatch, or earth.

It is hardly possible to find within the Tarahumare country two houses
exactly alike, although the main idea is always easily recognised. The
dwellings, though very airy, afford sufficient protection to people
who are by no means sensitive to drafts and climatic changes. The
Tarahumares do not expect their houses to be dry during the wet
season, but are content when there is some dry spot inside. If the
cold troubles them too much, they move into a cave. Many of the
people do not build houses at all, but are permanent or transient
cave-dwellers. This fact I thoroughly investigated in subsequent
researches, extending over a year and a half, and covering the entire
width and breadth of the Tarahumare country.

In this land of weather-worn porphyry and inter-stratified sandstone,
natural caves are met with everywhere, in which the people find a
convenient and safe shelter. Although it may be said that houses are
their main habitations, still the Tarahumares live in caves to such
an extent that they may be fitly called the American cave-dwellers
of the present age.

Caves were man's first abode, and they are found in certain geological
formations in all parts of the globe. Human imagination always peopled
the deep, dark caverns with terrible monsters guarding treasures, and
legends and fairy tales still cling about many of them. Shallow caves,
however, have from the earliest time attracted man to seek shelter in
them, just as the animals took refuge in them against the inclemency
of the weather. Prehistoric man in Europe was a cave-d