When at last all grew clear, I sat through the hours of darkness under a vast and vaulted sky in a silence so enfolding that it was awesome. Only once the whinny of a horse from a not distant corral broke the stillness; only once some four-footed creature trotted across the middle distance, stopped to watch me curiously, but, because I was motionless, went on its way, thinking, perhaps, I too was no more than an outcropping figure of those walls and bastions that seemed veritably the temple precincts of a more heroic age and race than ours. Then came the dawn, grey and pearly. As it warmed to rose, we bestirred ourselves, sobered by the solemnity of surroundings and of effects that baffle words—scarcely even to be named beauty because of overtones of a strange and wondrous majesty. Before saying a final farewell to the Sky City, we followed a road for nearly two miles, a little west of north, out to a point from which may be had the finest of all the general views of the Crag, with its many vertical pinnacles and shadowy coves. From there the length of the mesa-top is better comprehended, as well as the perfect adaptation of the long, low lines of the houses to the natural situation, while the great church with its two very solid towers is silhouetted against the sky as a separate and individual element of the composition. Nowhere can be better understood the keynote of pueblo culture, which is the astonishing harmony attained by the Indians with all the elemental forces surrounding him, especially evidenced in the building of his houses as a part of the natural setting. Five centuries ago the Spaniard found the Indian and his dwelling probably as they had been, it may well be, for thousands of years. To-day, of all existing pueblos, Ácoma has surrendered itself least to the changes which the invader endeavored to introduce and called “improvement.” [Illustration: THE LONG LINE OF ÁCOMA TWO MILES AWAY _Bolton_]