It was about seventy years before our English race gained a foothold on the eastern coast of America that, far away in the West, the seeds of another form of Eastern civilization began to fall upon ground which now belongs to our national territory. In the wilderness near the western border of New Mexico there stands a great crag, torn into curious shapes by the wear of ages, bearing on its summit a ruined fortress of a forgotten people and on its side hieroglyphic writing which no one can decipher. The same smooth sandstone surface which invited the picture-writing of the ancients has also tempted later passers-by to perpetuate their names. A long series of inscriptions in Spanish, begun before the first English had landed at Jamestown, tells how explorers, conquerors, government emissaries and missionaries of the Cross, passing that way, paused to leave their names on the enduring rock. That imperishable monument bears record to all time that this remotest region of our country, the last which the new life of the nineteenth century penetrates, was the first point to be touched by European civilization, if we except one old Florida fort. It is three hundred and forty years since the Spaniards entered New Mexico. There, almost at the centre of the continent, in the valleys of the Rio Grande and Colorado, the old Spanish life has remained, as unprogressive as a Chinese province, continuing to the middle of this century a kind of modified feudal system. But this old declining civilization of the South-west is new in comparison with that which the Spanish conquerors found existing in the country when they entered it. A remnant of that old half-civilized life lingers still, almost unchanged by contact with white men, in the seven citadels of the Moquis perched on the high _mesas_ of Arizona, while in the Pueblo villages of New Mexico we find it more affected by the Spanish influence.