THE BANDELIER NATIONAL FOREST 



565 



buttes; a glorious panorama radiant with tlie wonderful 

 coloring of the region. 



Clear in the horizon a thin wisp of smoke floats sky- 

 ward from a train on the main Santa Fe road forty or 

 more miles in an air line from where we sit. 



A plunge into a dense thicket of cedar and pinon 

 through which we can scarcely see ten feet ahead, and 



woods, alders and pines a rollicky little brooklet, an ideal 



trout stream but for the fact that a few miles below, it 



drops over a sheer precipice of almost a hundred feet up 



which no fish have ever found their way. Half hidden in 



a grove of trees just under us we catch glimpses of white 



tents, and the roof of a large stone house from the 



chimney of which the rising smoke speaks of the good 



cheer to be found in the home of 



the representative of the Forest 



Service who keeps watch and 



ward over this Pompeii of the 



New World. 



The dirty grey walls of the 

 canyon are pitted with thousands 

 of openings large and small, 

 many of them natural cavities 

 worn by the elements into the 

 friable volcanic dock, but many 

 more are doors, windows and 

 smoke holes drilled into the 

 sides of the canyon by the 

 strange people who once lived 

 here. 



Below us on the floor of the 

 .THE STRANGEST HOMES IN THE WORLD vallcy is a large crescent-shaped 



Thousands of rooms have been bored into the rocky walls. A line of small holes above many of these objCCt, for all the WOrld like a 

 rooms is presumed to have been used to support the roof of a veranda or porch. J 



huge piece of honey comb or a 



suddenly the road ends almost on the brink of a mighty 

 chasm, a gash in nature's face, mute evidence of her 

 warfare with the elements. 



Nobody tells us to stop our horses. The action is 

 absolutely automatic. We even pull the animals back a 

 step or two lest they stub their toes and drop themselves 

 and us especially us over the 

 edge along which they make 

 strong attempts to nibble at a 

 vagrant spear of grass that hangs 

 over the cliff. Whoever has rid- 

 den one of the mules down the 

 Grand Canyon trail to the Colo- 

 rado River in Arizona knows the 

 feeling inspired by this act. It is 

 essentially one of the best meth- 

 ods of developing goose pimples 

 and ragged nerves known to civi- 

 lized man. 



We dismount and step gingerly 

 to the edge of the cliff and stand 

 there entranced, for we are 

 looking down into a gorge cut 

 hundreds of feet deep into the 



solid rock, the far side nearly a mile distant. The wall 

 beneath us is almost perpendicular while the opposite side 

 slopes back at an agle of perhaps forty degrees. At 

 the bottom the "Rito de los Frijoles," a Spanish phrase, 

 which anglicized means just plain "Bean Creek," known 

 to the ancients of the region as "Tyu-on-yi" the treaty, 

 the compact threads is course through groves of cotton- 



number of small pens built of rock. It rests like a great 

 amphitheatre, the two ends of the crescent coming close 

 together leaving a comparatively narrow opening or 

 passage way into the enclosure or plaza formed by the 

 crescent, which for defensive purposes, might have been 

 closed with a gate. This the Forest Ranger tells us is 



A PRESENT DAY CEREMONIAL DANCE 

 The long lines of dancers swaying back and forth in their rhythmic posings. 



one of the communal houses or buildings of which so 

 many are found hereabouts and which, until it was exca- 

 vated and cleared of the rubbish of centuries by the 

 Santa Fe branch of the American Archaeological Society, 

 was merely a huge shapeless mound. 



A little to our right as we stand at the edge of the 

 cliff the ranger points to what he calls the "jumping off 



