Several miles beyond the little grotto of the Oraibi war-gods, a concealed shrine of quaint images, passing that place where Youkeoma’s adherents lost the contest to decide their traditional rights in the town of Oraibi, one came to a wall of shattered rock. These Hotevilla cliffs have little of dignity; they picture chaos, as it was left by the rending and scarring of some violent earthquake in the ages gone. To-day the ubiquitous Ford may ascend that wall on a wide and evenly graded roadway, because I grew tired of risking my neck there; but it was not so in 1911. My team had a tug of it up a dipping and winding trail that the Indians, under guard, no doubt, had crudely torn from the masses of tumbled sandstone. The second steppe was dotted with thicket from which, on the winds of springtime, stirs the fragrance of heliotrope. There were patches of deep sand, and more of rock outcroppings, and then appeared the fields of the natives, irregular gardens of corn and beans and melons, growing profusely. These people can make a rock-quarry bloom and produce food. The Hotevilla are always one year ahead of famine. At some time in the past they must have suffered desperately from crop-failure, and that bitter lesson taught them never again to trust a single harvest. The pueblo itself was on the westernmost edge of the mesa. There, where the rocks dropped away again in huge broken steps, overlooking the vast Dinnebito Wash country, they had built their curious little houses of stone and mud. If not balanced on the edge of a precipice, apparently the Hopi are not happy. Fatalists—when the aged or blind plunge over it is regretted, but not grieved about sufficiently to disparage the site. Alcoves of the mesa benches were fenced with cottonwood boughs, and served as hanging balconies for their burro stock. They had no cattle, few sheep, and fewer horses; in fact they were and are the poorest of the Hopi people, having rejected all tenders of acquisition and progress; but in those things that do not run counter to the traditions, such as cornmeal and burros, they have great wealth. There was one man with me, and he advised against going down into the village. Indeed, I was not inclined to insist on it, for coincident with our topping the last rise the roofs of the highest houses had been posted with guards, watching, watching us in an ominous manner: a custom that prevailed for many years, and one that causes the stranger to feel a trifle less than comfortable. “Very likely they feel that we slipped up on them,” I said to my companion.