Richard Wetherill discovered an unusually large group of buildings which he named "The Cliff Palace," in which the ground plan showed more than one hundred compartments, covering an area over four hundred feet in length and eighty feet in depth in the wider portion. Usually the buildings are continuous where the configuration of the cliffs permitted such construction. In the following account Baron Nordenskiöld has given us the most exhaustive description of Cliff Palace yet published:[8] [Footnote 8: In The Cliff Dwellers of the Mesa Verde (a translation in English from the Swedish edition, Stockholm, 1893), (pp. 59-66), unfortunately not accessible to most readers on account of the limited edition and the cost. For this reason the description is here reproduced in extenso. (The references to illustrations and the footnotes in this excerpt follow Nordenskiöld.)] In a long, but not very deep branch of Cliff Cañon, a wild and gloomy gorge named Cliff Palace Cañon, lies the largest of the ruins on the Mesa Verde, the Cliff Palace. Strange and indescribable is the impression on the traveller, when, after a long and tiring ride through the boundless, monotonous piñon forest, he suddenly halts on the brink of the precipice, and in the opposite cliff beholds the ruins of the Cliff Palace, framed in the massive vault of rock above and in a bed of sunlit cedar and piñon trees below (Pl. XII). This ruin well deserves its name, for with its round towers and high walls rising out of the heaps of stones deep in the mysterious twilight of the cavern, and defying in their sheltered site the ravages of time, it resembles at a distance an enchanted castle. It is not surprising that the Cliff Palace so long remained undiscovered. An attempt to follow Cliff Palace Cañon upward from Cliff Cañon meets with almost insurmountable obstacles in the shape of huge blocks of stone which have fallen from the cliffs and formed a barrier across the narrow water course, in most parts of the cañon the only practicable path between the steep walls of rock. Through the piñon forest, which renders the mesa a perfect labyrinth to the uninitiated, chance alone can guide the explorer to the exact spot from which a view of Cliff Palace is possible.