certain queer acidulous smell that pervades the rooms is attributable to them. As you walk about, your feet stir up the dust of ages. Here and there on the mud-plastered walls are human finger prints dried in the material when it was laid on by prehistoric hands. In some of the rooms, particularly in certain cave dwellings (which, following the natural ledges, you will find scooped out of the tufa cliff beside the Castle), the ceiling and walls are blackened still with soot from the smoke of pre-Columbian fires. You may pick up bits of pottery, as you stroll, corn-cobs wizened of the ages, broken metates, or malpais rubbing stones, mute reminders of the human drama once enacted here. The airy battlement is pierced with downward-pointing loopholes through which arrows were doubtless shot at foes below. It is this abounding and evident human touch, this mystery of a long vanished human life, that lends to Southwestern travel a unique fascination, reaching to something in us that is not awakened by purely natural aspects more sublime but disassociated from man. In spite of the fact that men will kill one another, mistreat, enslave and exploit one another, men never lose a supreme interest in men; stronger than all is the yearning of the human heart for other human hearts. Is it love outwearing love’s antithesis? Montezuma’s Well is 8 miles further up Beaver Creek, and is reached by a public highway quite practicable for automobiles when the fords of the creek are not running high water. You pass a ranch every mile or so, and the Well itself is found to be situated inside the wire fences of one. After the hospitable and unexacting solitude of Montezuma’s Castle, you will experience a bit of a shock, perhaps, at the fences and in finding that a fee of half a dollar is imposed for entrance to the Well. Nevertheless the sight is worth the money. Proceeding from the ranch house across an eighth of a mile of open, treeless mesa, you come quite without warning, to a crater-like[84] opening 500 feet across, yawning at your feet. Its walls drop almost perpendicularly some 60 feet or more to a round pool of clear water steel blue, except around the margins, where accumulations of pondweed give it a brown tinge. There is a precipitous, stony trail down which you may pick your way to the water’s edge; and there, as in the bottom of a colossal mush-bowl, you are hid from the world and the world from you. Catclaw and wild grape, hackberry and wild walnut and salt-bush make a scrubby cover roundabout, with datura and cleome and blooming wild tobacco adding a flower-touch. There is here as at Montezuma’s Castle a peculiar sense of loneliness and silence—broken only by an occasional bird note, or the hum of vagabond bees. In the clear, still waters of the pool are reflections of the cliffs, and raising your eyes to them you recognize in the southern side a few squat little stone houses wedged in between the strata of the rock walls.