FEWKES— RUINS IN FEWKES CANON 



At the right, as one enters the ruin from the eastern end, there are 

 several high walls fairly well preserved, which indicate that the eastern 

 end of the building was formerly three stories high, north of which 

 the structure was four stories high with a curved front wall, recalling 

 a room of similar shape in the same relative position in Spruce- 

 tree House. The walls of all these rooms are constructed of stone laid 

 in adobe mortar, the component stones sometimes having been arti- 

 ficially pecked with stone implements or smoothed by rubbing, the 

 joints being wide and well chinked with spalls. Externally the walls 

 were once covered with plaster, but it has now disappeared from many 

 of the rooms. 



A view of the exterior room with the round front wall is shown 

 in plate iv. The two openings in this wall, one of which is practically 

 rectangular, while the other is of the well-known T-shape, were 

 entrances respectively to the second and third-story rooms, the line 

 of the floor being indicated by an irregular hole above the lower 

 opening. Here rested one end of a beam, now gone, which supported 

 a floor. The upper opening, with well-formed sides, is closed by 

 a slab of stone. This opening was the doorway by which one 

 entered the upper room from a balcony below, as is indicated by a 

 projecting stone, forming a step, conveniently placed just below the 

 threshold shown in the illustration. Similar stepping-stones are 

 found in walls below doorways in Cliff Palace and other Mesa Verde 

 cliff -dwellings. It will be observed that the masonry of the lower part 

 of the curved wall is composed of larger stones than that of the upper 

 part, a feature common in pueblo construction. 



The best-preserved wall of Oak-tree House, shown in plate v, b, 

 rises from the top of a large fallen mass of rock about midway in 

 the ruin between Kiva B and Kiva D. This belongs to a building 

 two stories high ; the openings and ledges for the floor-beams are still 

 well marked. The two square openings, facing westward, and a third 

 somewhat smaller, are well made and probably served as windows. 

 The masonry, especially about the windows, is among the best found 

 in the Mesa Verde. The wall surfaces are plastered inside and out, 

 the stones artificially worked though not bonded, and the corners 

 vertical. 



Near the northwestern angle of an open court there remains about 

 half of the wall of a room (a) of exceptional construction, in that it is 

 not built of masonry, but of intertwined willow or other saplings and 

 sticks, set in adobe mud, plastered inside and out with the same mate- 

 rial. The wall is black with smoke from the floor to the top of the 

 cave, which is here quite low and forms the roof of the structure, a 



[105] 



