90 



CURIOUS HOMES AND THEIR TENANTS. 



j-^<^. 



tion of a puebla building. Suppose, for instance, 

 the puebla to be three stories high and three deep. 

 The oiiter walls will be three stories high, but the 

 top storj only one room deep, the second story two 

 rooms deep, and the first story three rooms deep. 

 Seen from the country behind it, the building: will 



look like a house with 

 perpendicular walls, but 

 seen from the courtyard 

 it appears terraced. The 

 doors were in the ceil- 

 ings of the rooms and 

 were entered from above 

 by means of ladders, the 

 dwellers in the top stories 

 having to go up three 

 ladders and over the roofs 

 of each of the lower tiers. 

 Some of the jjueblas are five hundred feet long, and 

 contain hundreds of rooms. 



But besides these pueblas, the people who lived in 

 them had their cities of refuge high up in caverns in 

 the side of inaccessible cliffs, where they built the 

 most wonderful habitations, perhaps, in the known 

 world. The part of the country in which these ruins 

 are found is now very desolate, for the time when 

 they were built is so very long ago that a radical 

 change of climate has taken place, and where great 

 fields of waving corn once grew, scarcely a living 

 plant appears. 



In southern Colorado rises the river San Juan. 



Terraced puebla. 



