The Rio Pecos (which empties into the Rio Grande fully five degrees more to the south, in the State of Texas) hugs, in the upper part of the valley, closely to the mountains of Tecolote, and thence runs almost directly north and south. The high _mesa_ opposite, known as the Mesa de Pecos, sweeps around in huge semicircles, but in a general direction from north-west to south-east. The upper part of the valley, therefore, forms a triangle, whose apex, at the south, would be near San José: whereas its base-line at the north might be indicated as from the Plaza de Pecos to Baughl's Sidings; or rather from the Rio Pecos, east of the town, to the foot of the _mesa_ on the west, a length of over six miles. Nearly in the centre of this triangle, two miles west of the river, and one and a half miles from Baughl's, there rises a narrow, semicircular cliff or _mesilla_, over the bed of a stream known as the Arroyo de Pecos.[89] The southern end of this tabular cliff (its highest point as well as its most sunny slope) is covered with very extensive ruins, representing, as I shall hereafter explain, _three distinct kinds of occupation of the place by man_. These ruins are known under the name of the Old Pueblo of Pecos. The tourist who, in order to reach Santa Fé from the north, takes the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé Railroad at La Junta, Colorado,--fascinated as he becomes by the beauty as well as by the novelty of the landscape, while running parallel with the great Sierra Madre, after he has traversed the Ratonis at daybreak,--enters a still more weird country in the afternoon. The Rio Pecos is crossed just beyond Bernal, and thence on he speeds towards the west and north: to the left, the towering Mesa de Pecos, dark pines clambering up its steep sides; to the right, the broad valley, scooped out, so to say, between the _mesa_ and the Tecolote ridge. It is dotted with green patches and black clusters of cedar and pine shooting out of the red and rocky soil. Scarcely a house is visible, for the _casitas_ of adobe and wood nestle mostly in sheltered nooks. Beyond Baughl's, the ruins first strike his view; the red walls of the church stand boldly out on the barren _mesilla_; and to the north of it there are two low brown ridges, the remnants of the Indian houses. The bleak summits of the high northern chain seem to rise in height as he advances; even the distant Trout mountains (Sierra de la Trucha) loom up solemnly towards the head-waters of the Pecos. About Glorieta the vale disappears, and through the shaggy crests of the Cañon del Apache, which overlooks the track in awful proximity, he sallies out upon the central plain of northern New Mexico, six thousand eight hundred feet above the sea-level. To the south-west the picturesque Sandia mountains;[90] to the west, far off, the Heights of Jemez and the Sierra del Valle, bound the level and apparently barren table-land. An hour more of fearfully rapid transit with astonishing curves, and, at