_Canyon de Chelly_ The Story of its Ruins and People by Zorro A. Bradley Office of Publications National Park Service U.S. Department of the Interior Washington, D.C., 1973 _Library of Congress Catalog Card Number_ 73-600078 Contents Discovery of the Ruins 3 The Principal Ruins 7 White House 7 Antelope House 9 Standing Cow 12 Big Cave 13 Mummy Cave 15 The People of Canyon de Chelly 17 The Anasazi 18 The Navajos 27 Further Reading 57 Maps 8, 24, 39 _Far up above me, a thousand feet or so, set in a great cavern in the face of the cliff, I saw a little city of stone asleep. It was as still as sculpture—and something like that. It all hung together, seemed to have a kind of composition: pale little houses of stone nestling close to one another, perched on top of each other, with flat roofs, narrow windows, straight walls, and in the middle of the group, a round tower...._ _In sunlight it was the colour of winter oak leaves. A fringe of cedars grew along the edge of the cavern, like a garden. They were the only living things. Such silence and stillness and repose—immortal repose. That village sat looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity.... I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries, preserved in the dry air and almost perpetual sunlight like a fly in amber, guarded by the cliffs and the river and the desert._ —_Willa Cather_ Quotation from _The Professor’s House_, 1925, by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, New York. [Illustration: The righthand section of Mummy Cave Ruin as it was photographed by Ben Wittick in 1882 during the James Stevenson Survey for the Smithsonian Institution.] Discovery of the Ruins