One of the lights that was "raised," as the sailors would say, in the evening, was in what seemed to be a perpendicular cliff on the opposite side of the mighty barranca, as near as we could make out in the gloom of the falling night. Its position was located, and, surely enough, on the next day our conjectures were verified, for we could see a few dim dottings showing caves, while to the main one led up a steep talus of _débris_ that tapered to a point just in front of the entrance. Strangest of all, but a little way down the side of this very steep talus, so very steep that one would have had much difficulty in ascending unless there were brush to assist in climbing, we could easily make out, with the help of our glasses, that corn had been planted by these strange people. It seemed as if the tops of the dwarf plants were just up to the roots of the next row of corn above them, if they can really be said to have been planted in rows at all. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF A CLIFF DWELLER'S HOME, SEVENTY-FIVE FEET ABOVE THE WATER.] Much as I would have liked to visit the place, the condition of my mules and the state of my provisions made it clearly out of the question; moreover, I was informed that better chances to see cliff dwellers would present themselves before long, which statement, fortunately, was soon verified. Not far from Camp Diaz was a place where we could have tied our braided horsehair lariats together and let a person down one hundred to two hundred feet into the tops of some tall pine trees, and from there gain the first incline, which, though dizzily steep, I think would have led, by a little Alpine engineering, into the bottom of the big barranca four or five thousand feet below, and thence an ascent could be made to the caves of the cliff dwellers. But there were other and more potent considerations, which I have given, that prevented our attempting this acrobatic performance with the cliffs and crags as spectators. We might say that we were now out of the land of the living cave dwellers and in the land of the living cliff dwellers, although the latter live in caves in the cliffs. But I make the distinction between the two, of caves on the level of the ground in the valleys or the sides of mountains, and the caves in cliffs or walls. The latter are reached by notched sticks used as ladders, or, as I saw in a few cases, by natural steps in the strata of alternate hard and soft rock, and up which nothing but a monkey or a Sierra Madre cliff dweller could ascend. Many of these cliff houses in the caves and great indentations are one hundred to two hundred feet above the water of some mountain stream, over which they hang like swallows' nests. Truly they are a most wonderful and interesting people, well worth a large volume or two to describe all that is singular and different in them from other people, savage or civilized. [Illustration: IN THE LAND OF THE LIVING CLIFF DWELLERS.]