Long since, there had been a flourishing Mexican town in the valley. A wagonroad had painfully climbed a long ridge to the Rim, twisting, doubling, turning, clinging hazardously to the hillside, its outer edge a wall built up with stone, till it came to the shoulder under the tremendous barrier. From there it turned northward, paralleling the Rim in mile-long curve above a deep gorge; turning, in a last desperate climb, to a solitary gateway in the black wall, torn out by flood-waters through slow centuries. Smallpox had smitten the people; the treacherous river had devastated the fertile valley, and, subsiding, left the rich fields a waste of sand. The town was long deserted; the disused road was gullied and torn by flood, the soil washed away, leaving a heaped and crumbled track of tangled stone. But it was the only practicable way as far as the sand-hills, and Jeff led his horse down the ruined path, with many a turning back and scrambling detour. The shadows of the eastern hills drew back before him as he reached the sand-dunes. When he rode through the silent streets of what had been Alamocita, the sun peered over Fray Cristobal, gilding the crumbling walls, where love and laughter had made music, where youth and hope and happiness had been.... Silent now and deserted, given over to lizard and bat and owl, the smiling gardens choked with sand and grass, springing with _mesquite_ and _tornillo_; a few fruit trees, gnarled and tangled, drooping for days departed, when young mothers sang low lullaby beneath their branches.... Passed away and forgotten--hopes and fears, tears and smiles, birth and death, joy and sorrow, hatred and sin and shame, falsehood and truth and courage and love. The sun shone cheerfully on these gray ruins--as it has shone on a thousand such, and will shine. Jeff turned down the river, past the broken _acequias_, to where a massive spur of basaltic rock had turned the fury of the floods and spared a few fields. In this sheltered cove dwelt Don Francisco Escobar in true pastoral and patriarchal manner; his stalwart sons and daughters, with their sons and daughters in turn, in clustering _adobes_ around him: for neighbors, the allied family of Gonzales y Ortega. A cheerful settlement, this of Los Banos, nestling at the foot of the friendly rampart, sheltered alike from flood and wind. South and west the close black Rim walled the horizon, the fantasy of Fray Cristobal closed in the narrow east: but northward, beyond the low sand-hills and the blue heat-haze, the high peaks of Organ, Guadalupe and Rainbow swam across the sleepy air, far and soft and dim.