314 NINTH ANNUAL REPORT OF 



time to time to seek for these hidden treasures. Some of these holes 

 look as if they were made more than a century ago, while others ap- 

 pear to be quite recent. Even the ashes of the dead have not been 

 left undisturbed during these explorations. Near the east end of the 

 chapel we saw where the people who had been digging had thrown 

 up a great many human bones, which now lie scattered about. From 

 these we have selected six skulls to send to some one who is skilled in 

 the science of craniology, that he ma}'^ determine, if possible, to what 

 race of people they once belonged. These skulls are thought to be 

 unusually large. 



The ruins of Gran Quivira have hitherto occupied the same position 

 with respect to the boundless prairies which the fabulous island of Atlantis 

 did to the ocean in days of antiquity. No one seemed to know exactly 

 where this city was situated. Bat the uncertainty of its localit}'' seemed 

 to make no difference in regard to the interest that was felt concerning 

 it ; lor people would believe in its existence, and receive great pleasure 

 in listening to traditions about its marvellous beauty and magnificence, 

 even when to a reasonable mind those traditions and accounts ran 

 counter to probability. 



Men of genius and distinction have taken great pains in following up 

 mazes in the labyrinth of reports concerning it, whether oral or written, 

 and in their glowing descriptions it has appeared almost like a city of 

 enchantment. To them it had paved streets, and fluted columns, and 

 ornate friezes, and sculptured facades ; it had the remains of aqueducts 

 and fountains; it had long colonnades, and even barbaric statuary; it 

 had the groined arch, the shouldering buttress, the quaint gargoyle, and 

 everything in outline and in detail that could betoken skill, and taste, 

 and opulence. It was a city, they said, whose inhabitants departed 

 from it so long back in the gloom and mists of the past as to leave in 

 utter obscurity all other records concerning them. 



The sphynx, they said, about whose bosom the sands from the Lybian 

 desert had drilled lor unknown centuries, was no more of an enigma 

 than this was. Here were palaces and temples, and deserted courts, 

 and long-echoing corridors, and grass-grown streets, and reigning over all 

 a silence so profound as almost to be heard. 



Historical societies had taken up these descriptions, and filed them 

 away among their transactions as documents of deep interest. Vene- 

 rable and learned ethnologists searched in dusty manuscripts and black- 

 letter volumes of antiquity for some authentic account of that race of 

 men who reared and then abandoned such a city. But to this moment 

 their researches have proved fruitless, and the story they seek is still 

 recorded in an unsealed book. 



Our business is not that which will permit us to clothe with imagi- 

 nary grandeur these vestiges of a people whose name has been erased 

 from the book of nations, nor that which will allow us time to indulge 

 ill abstruse speculations as to their race or their language. These 

 things belong to the poet and philosopher. With all those pleasant 

 reveries and romantic fancies which these ruins away here on a desert 

 are so wonderfully calculated to awaken we can have nothing to do. 

 We came here to note realities ; and now the facts we have seen, the 

 theories we have read which were of value, the traditions we have 



