pin of obsidian which you would swear was an
Egyptian scarab if I had not myself obtained it from the ossuaries of
the Cave Dwellers in the American Southwest.

Come out now to the cave door and look up and down the canyon again! To
right and to left for a height of 500 feet the face of the yellow _tufa_
precipice is literally pitted with the windows and doors of the Stone
Age City. In the bottom of the valley is a roofless dwelling of hundreds
of rooms--"the cormorant and the bittern possess it; the owl also and
the raven dwell in it; stones of emptiness; thorns in the palaces;
nettles and brambles in the fortresses; and the screech owl shall rest
there."

Listen! You can almost hear it--the fulfillment of Isaiah's old
prophecy--the lonely "hoo-hoo-hoo" of the turtle dove; and the lonelier
cry of the eagle circling, circling round the empty doors of the upper
cliffs! Then, the sharp, short bark-bark-bark of a fox off up the canyon
in the yellow pine forests towards the white snows of the Jemez
Mountains; and one night from my camp in this canyon, I heard the coyotes
howling from the empty caves.

Below are the roofless cities of the dead Stone Age, and the dancing
floors, and the irrigation canals used to this day, and the stream
leaping down from the Jemez snows, which must once have been a rushing
torrent where wallowed such monsters as are known to-day only in modern
men's dreams.

Far off to the right, where the worshipers must always have been in
sight of the snowy mountains and have risen to the rising of the desert
sun over cliffs of ocher and sands of orange and a sky of turquoise
blue, you can see the great Kiva or Ceremonial Temple of the Stone Age
people who dwelt in this canyon. It is a great concave hollowed out of
the white pumice rock almost at the cliff top above the tops of the
highest yellow pines. A darksome, cavernous thing it looks from this
distance, but a wonderful mid-air temple for worshipers when you climb
the four or five hundred ladder steps that lead to it up the face of a
white precipice sheer as a wall. What sights the priests must have
witnessed! I can understand their worshiping the rising sun as the first
rays came over the canyon walls in a shield of fire. Alcoves for meal,
for incense, for water urns, mark the inner walls of this chamber, too.
Where the ladder projects up through the floor, you can descend to the
hollowed underground chamber where the priests and the council met