ver, the buttressed and fantastic peaks of Fray Cristobal; their
jutting shadows streaming into the gulf beyond, athwart the silvery
ribbon of gleaming water, twining in mazy loops across the valley floor:
it showed the black Rim at his feet, a frowning level wall of lava
cliff, where the plain broke abruptly into the chasm beneath; the iron
desolation of the steep sides, boulder-strewn, savage and forbidding:

"_A land of old up-heaven from the abyss._"

Long since, there had been a flourishing Mexican town in the valley. A
wagonroad had painfully climbed a long ridge to the Rim, twisting,
doubling, turning, clinging hazardously to the hillside, its outer edge
a wall built up with stone, till it came to the shoulder under the
tremendous barrier. From there it turned northward, paralleling the Rim
in mile-long curve above a deep gorge; turning, in a last desperate
climb, to a solitary gateway in the black wall, torn out by flood-waters
through slow centuries. Smallpox had smitten the people; the treacherous
river had devastated the fertile valley, and, subsiding, left the rich
fields a waste of sand. The town was long deserted; the disused road was
gullied and torn by flood, the soil washed away, leaving a heaped and
crumbled track of tangled stone. But it was the only practicable way as
far as the sand-hills, and Jeff led his horse down the ruined path,
with many a turning back and scrambling detour.

The shadows of the eastern hills drew back before him as he reached the
sand-dunes. When he rode through the silent streets of what had been
Alamocita, the sun peered over Fray Cristobal, gilding the crumbling
walls, where love and laughter had made music, where youth and hope and
happiness had been.... Silent now and deserted, given over to lizard and
bat and owl, the smiling gardens choked with sand and grass, springing
with _mesquite_ and _tornillo_; a few fruit trees, gnarled and tangled,
drooping for days departed, when young mothers sang low lullaby beneath
their branches.... Passed away and forgotten--hopes and fears, tears and
smiles, birth and death, joy and sorrow, hatred and sin and shame,
falsehood and truth and courage and love. The sun shone cheerfully on
these gray ruins--as it has shone on a thousand such, and will shine.

Jeff turned down the river, past the broken _acequias_, to where a
massive spur of basaltic rock had turned the fury of the floods and
spared a few fields. In this sheltered cove