The most famous of the ruins is the Gran Quivira at the edge of the Gallinas foothills, 24 miles south of Mountainair. They are the remains of a large pueblo of low, stone houses, covering altogether about 80 acres and once housing perhaps a couple of thousand souls. There are the ruins of several _estufas_, of irrigation works, and of two Christian churches. The pueblo occupies the narrow crest of a ridge overlooking a vast, lonely, cedar- and piñon-dotted plain that reaches to far-off, dreamy mountain ranges. It is in a solitude of solitudes wrapped in the silence of death, and as almost everywhere in the plateau region of northern New Mexico and Arizona, one has the feeling of being alone on the roof of the world, though the elevation here is really but 6800 feet. The most conspicuous feature of this shattered town is the larger of the two churches whose gaunt, gray, roofless walls of flat limestone pieces laid in mortar and rising to a height of 30 feet, are visible to the traveler long before he reaches the place. Seen “from the northeast, through vistas of cedars and junipers,” to quote Bandelier, “the ruins shine in pallid light like some phantom city of the desert.” Adjoining the church, are the ruins of a _convento_ of several small rooms and a refectory, built about an interior courtyard. The whole has an unfinished appearance, and Bandelier believed that work on the building was suddenly interrupted and never resumed. Indeed, the whole place is shrouded in mystery—its beginning and its end are alike in the twilight. No record has been left by the old chroniclers of any mission called Gran Quivira; but there is frequent mention by them of Tabirá, whose location fairly corresponds to this. That was a town of the Piro Pueblos, where an important Mission was established about 1630 by Padre Francisco de Acevedo. It ceased to be heard of after half a century, and it is believed that repeated raids of the barbarous Apaches—the red terror of the peacable Pueblos—caused the abandonment of the village. In all human probability that Tabirá is this Gran Quivira, but how the latter name became attached to these ruins has never been satisfactorily explained; for, as has already been stated, Quivira was Coronado’s name for the country of the Wichitas, far away in Kansas. The Piro people, who are believed to have inhabitated this pueblo (and that of Abó, of which something shortly), are about as extinct as their towns. Only an insignificant remnant, and these speaking an alien tongue, exist today, in the Mexican State of Chihuahua.