ely cries along the
yawning caverns of the cliff face above.

My feet rest on the topmost step of a stone stairway worn hip-deep in
the rocks of eternity by the moccasined tread of foot-prints that run
back, not to A. D. or B. C., but to those post-glacial aeons when the
advances and recessions of an ice invasion from the Poles left seas
where now are deserts; when giant sequoia forests were swept under the
sands by the flood waters, and the mammoth and the dinosaur and the
brontosaur wallowed where now nestle farm hamlets.

Such a tiny doorway it is that Stone Man must have been obliged to
welcome a friend by hauling him shoulders foremost through the entrance,
or able to speed the parting foe down the steep stairway with a rock on
his head. Inside, behind me, is a little dome-roofed room, with
calcimined walls, and squared stone meal bins, and a little, high
fireplace, and stone pillows, and a homemade flour mill in the form of a
flat _metate_ stone with a round grinding stone on top. From the shape
and from the remnants of pottery shards lying about, I suspect one of
these hewn alcoves in the inner wall was the place for the family water
jar.

On each side the room are tiny doorways leading by stone steps to
apartments below and to rooms above; so that you may begin with a valley
floor room which you enter by ladder and go halfway to the top of a
500-foot cliff by a series of interior ladders and stone stairs. Flush
with the floor at the sides of these doors are the most curious little
round "cat holes" through the walls--"cat holes" for a people who are
not supposed to have had any cats; yet the little round holes run from
room to room through all the walls.

On some of the house fronts are painted emblems of the sun. Inside,
round the wall of the other houses, runs a drawing of the plumed
serpent--"Awanya," guardian of the waters--whose presence always
presaged good cheer of water in a desert land growing drier and drier as
the Glacial Age receded, and whose serpent emblem in the sky you could
see across the heavens of a starry night in the Milky Way. Lying about
in other cave houses are stone "bells" to call to meals or prayers, and
cobs of corn, and prayer plumes--owl or turkey feathers. Don't smile and
be superior! It isn't a hundred years ago since the common Christian
idea of angels was feathers and wings; and these Stone People
lived--well, when _did_ they live? Not later than 400 A. D., for that
was whe