But Española serves, too, as a base for outings of quite another sort. One of these is to the remarkable prehistoric cliff village known as the Puyé in the Santa Clara Cañon, about 10 miles west of Española. Here at the edge of a pine forest a vast tufa cliff rises, its face marked with pictographs of unknown antiquity and honeycombed with dwellings of a vanished people, probably ancestors, of some of the present-day Pueblos.[12] These cliff chambers are quite small, and their walls bear still the soot from prehistoric fires. Climbing by an ancient trail to the summit of the mesa of which the cliff is a side, you come upon the leveled ruins of what was once a magnificent, terraced community house, built of tufa blocks and containing hundreds of rooms. Rambling from room to room, picking up now a bit of broken pottery, now a charred corn-cob, poking into the ashes of fireplaces where the last embers were quenched before history in America began, you experience, I hope, a becoming sense of your youth as a white American. And the view from this noble tableland—a view those ancient people had every day of their lives! One wonders had they eyes to see it—the lovely valley of the Rio Grande, purple chain after chain of mountains on every side, the jagged peaks of the Sangre de Cristo, the Glorietas, the Jemes, and dim on the far horizon, the Sierra Blanca in Colorado. Also dotting the same plateau (this region by the way, is now called Pajarito[13] Park) are numerous other prehistoric community houses—the Otowi (with its curious tent-like rock formations), the Tsánkawi, the Tchrega—all of absorbing interest to the archaeologic mind, but offering not much that seems new to the average tourist who has seen the Puyé. One, however, known as the Tyuonyi in the cañon of the Rito de los Frijoles[14] should not be missed. It may be reached via Buckman, a station on the D. & R. G. 12 miles south of Española. Thence it is about 15 miles over all sorts of a road to the brink of Frijoles Cañon. A steep foot-trail there leads you down, a thousand feet or more, into the gorge and after a short walk you are at the comfortable ranch house of Judge A. G. Abbott, custodian of the Bandelier National Monument, under which name the neighboring ruins are officially designated by the United States Government, which owns them.[15] Considered merely as scenery, the little, secluded cañon is one of the loveliest spots in New Mexico, with its stretches of emerald meadows, its perennial stream and its peaceful forest of stately pines. But it is the human interest given by the vacant houses of a forgotten race—the cavate dwellings of the pink and white tufa cliffs and the ruined communal dwellings on the cañon floor and on the mesa top near by—that brings most visitors. That noted ethnologist, the late Adolf F. Bandelier, wrote a romance with the scene laid here and at the Puyé. It is entitled “The Delightmakers,” and a