insure one of these petrified pinnacles of nature. One of them, two hundred feet in height, as seen from the cañon, was as good a spread eagle as a person would want to see cut out of stone, while on a tower not a hundred yards away was a bust of Hadrian, quite as good as that in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ten times as large, and a thousandfold more conspicuously placed. A person with a small amount of imagination could easily make a land of enchantment out of this _arroyo_ with its singular columns and pillars, its leaning towers and busts and statues, that meet him on every side and are repeated every few hundred yards by great cañons that break off to the right and left, and which are perfect duplicates of the original through which the traveler wends his way. Strange, singular, and curious as are these works of nature, they are not so astonishing to the average civilized person as the works of man. Among these beetling crags and dizzy cliffs savage men have found places to erect their houses and live their lives. Ladders of notched sticks lead from one crag to the crest of another, whenever the rude steps made by nature do not allow these creatures of the cliffs to climb their almost perpendicular faces; a false step on the slight ladders or a turning of one of them, which to me seemed so likely, would send the climber two hundred to three hundred feet to the bottom of the cañon, perhaps a mangled corpse. [Illustration: HOMES OF CLIFF DWELLERS IN ARROYO DE LAS IGLESIAS.] Had I wanted to visit them directly in their homes I doubt very much if I could have reached them, for I am sorry to say I am not a sailor, a tight-rope performer, or an aëronaut. Beyond this place the people had fled to their houses, and could, by disarranging a single notched stick, have made our ascent impossible. This, I think, was one of the methods of defense adopted by ancient cliff dwellers of Arizona, as shown at least by some which I have seen and which now, with the logs rotted away, are unapproachable. It is even possible, as I have more than hinted before, that there is some closer affinity between the Arizona and Mexican cliff dwellers than this simple but suggestive one I have mentioned. It is certainly a question I would like to see some good archæologist struggle with for a year or two. So steep are the walls of the Arroyo de las Iglesias in many places where we observed cliff dwellers that, had they thrown an object from the little portholelike window of their stone pens with ordinary strength, it would certainly have brought up in the cañon bottom probably two hundred or three hundred feet below. How they can rear little children on these cliffs without a loss of one hundred per cent. annually is to me one of the most mysterious things connected with these strange people.