THE ANCIENT PEOPLES. 31 



1890. The cave which shelters it is 425 feet long, 80 

 feet wide in the middle, and reaches an extreme height 

 of 80 feet. It occupies the eastern end of Cliff Palace 

 Canyon which is here about 200 feet deep. The cave 

 opening, therefore, faces the w^est, with its axis roughly 

 north and south. It resulted from the wearing away 

 by the elements of a stratum of soft sandstone which 

 was protected above by a harder layer that has remained 

 to form the roof. Parts of the rock have broken from 

 this roof and have fallen to the floor below where they 

 have either remained or rolled out to form a slop- 

 ing talus along its base. The floor of the cave as a 

 result is very uneven so that the structure stands upon 

 four terraces of varying height with some of the rooms 

 resting upon large blocks of rock. 



It appears that it was not planned and built as a 

 whole but that the first buildings were added to from 

 time to time, both on the sides and above. The walls 

 of this structure which enclose 117 rooms, not counting 

 those of the upper stories, were built of red sandstone 

 well dressed and laid with adobe mortar in regular 

 courses. The irregularities are chinked with stone 

 fragments. The corners of the walls are not bonded 

 nor are the joints of the stones regularly broken in the 

 courses. It seems that these devices and that of the 

 arch and its keystone were unknown to the ancient 

 peoples. These walls which are from one to two feet 

 in thickness were generally plastered on the inside and 

 sometimes on the outside with a yellow plaster laid 

 on and smoothed with the hands, the prints of which 



