13 



forty feet above the riv^er, a bed of shale occurs ia the sandstone, which, 

 being easily disintegrated, has been weathered out and carried away, 

 leaving a sort of horizontal groove some four feet high and from four to 

 six feet deep. In this a row of diminutive houses has been built. Three 

 of these are almost perfect, having a fresh new look that certainly belies 

 their age. Four others are much more decayed, and fragments of wall 

 only cling to the cliffs. They have been made to occupy the full height 

 and depth of the crevice, so that when one reaches it at the only acces- 

 sible point, he is between two houses and must pass through these to 

 get at the others. The doorways are quite small and bear no evidence 

 of the fitting or hanging of doors; and the windows, of which a number 

 open to the front, are but a few inches square. 



The walls are strongly built and are from eight to ten inches thick. 

 The stones are small, dressed roughly on the outside, and laid in mortar. 



In many places, the heavier seams of mortar have been chinked with 

 bits of pottery and small ilakes of sandstone. The marks of the masons^ 

 pick are as fresh as if made within a few years, and the fine, hard 

 mud-mortar, which has been applied with the bare hands, still retains 

 impressions of the minute markings of the cuticle of the fingers. 



The house at the left hand in the drawing has two apartments, the 

 farthest of which has a curved wall conforming with the rounded end 

 of the crevice floor, which, beyond this for some distance, is broken 

 down. 



Specimens of the moitar and of the dressed stone were procured from 

 this house and brought east. Below the middle part of this line of 

 houses, on an irregular projection, are the remains of a number of walls, 

 in such a state of ruin, however, that the character of the original 

 structure could not be made out. In digging among the debris of this 

 ruin, I came upon a biu of charred corn, in which the forms of the ears 

 were quite perfect. It seems to be of a variety similar to that cultivated 

 by the tribes of the neighborhood at the present time. 



That this corn had been placed there by the ancient occupants seems 

 probable from the fact that it occupied a sort of basement apartment 

 or cellar, and had been buried beneath the fallen walls of the super- 

 structures. Imbedded in this mass of charcoal, I found the very perfect 

 specimen of stone implement figured in plate XIV (figure 3). Many large 

 fragments of the ordinary painted pottery were also picked up here. A 

 certain new look about portions of this group leads one to suspect that 

 it cannot boast of great antiquity; but it is very difficult to calculate 

 the effects of age upon walls so perfectly protected and in such a climate. 



The group given in figure 2 is of a much more interesting and remark- 

 able character. It was first observed from the trail, far below and 

 nearly three-fourths of a mile away. From this point, by the aid of a 

 field-glass, the sketch given in the plate was made. So cleverly are the 

 bouses hidden away in the dark recesses, and so very like the surround- 

 ing cliffs in color, that I had almost completed the sketch of the upper 

 house before the lower or "sixteeu-windowed" one was detected. Thej' 

 are at least eight hundred feet above the river. The lower five hundred 

 feet is of rough cliff-broken slope, the remainder of massive bedded 

 sandstone full of wind-worn niches, crevices, and caves. Within one 

 hundred feet of the cliff-top, set deep in a great niche, with arched, over- 

 hanging roof, is the upper house, its front wall built along the very 

 brink of a sheer precipice. Thirty feet below, in a similar but less 

 remarkable niche, is the larger house, with its long line of apertures^ 

 which I afterward found to be openings intended rather for the inser- 

 tion of beams than for windows. 



