Oh! the pathos, the woe, the untold but clearly written misery of the centuries in these cliff-built houses of the mesas, these residences that are fortresses, these steep trail-approached and precipice-protected homes. In a desert land, surrounded by relentless, wary, and vigilant foes, ever fighting a hard battle with the adverse conditions of their environment, short of water, of firewood, and with food grown in the desert-rescued lands below where at any moment the ruthless marauder might appear, there is no wonder that almost every elderly face is seamed and scarred; furrowed deeply with the accumulated centuries of never-ceasing care. Mystery here seems at first to reign supreme. It stands and faces one as a Presence. It hovers and broods, and you feel it even in your sleep. The air is full of it. The very clouds here are mysterious. Who are these people? From whence came they? What is their destiny? What fearful battles, race hatreds, devastating wars, led them to make their homes on these inaccessible cliffs? How did they ever conceive such a mass of elaborate ceremonial as now controls them? Solitary and alone they appear, a vast question mark, viewed from every standpoint. Whichever way one looks at them a great query stares him in the face. They are the chief mystery of our country, an anachronism, an anomaly in our twentieth-century civilization. When we see the ruins of Egypt, India, Assyria, we look upon something that is past. Those peoples _were_: they pertain to the ages that are gone. Their mysteries are of lives lived in the dim ages of antiquity. But here are antique lives being lived in our own day; pieces of century-old civilizations transplanted, in time and place, and brought into our time and place; the past existent in the present; the lapse of centuries forgotten, and the days of thousands of years ago bodily transferred into our commercial, super-cultured, hyper-refined age. The approach to the first mesa from Keam's Canyon is through a sandy country, which, in places, is dry, desolate, and bare. But here and there are patches of ground upon which weeds grow to a great height, plainly indicating that with cultivation and irrigation good crops could be raised. As we leave the mouth of the canyon the singular character of this plateau province is revealed. To the south the sandy desert, in lonesome desolation, stretches away as far as the eye can reach, its wearisome monotony relieved only by the close-by corn-fields of the Hopis and the peculiar buttes of the Mogollons. With the sun blazing down upon it, its forbidding barrenness is appalling. Neither tree, shrub, blade of grass, animal, or human habitation is to be seen. The sand reflects the sun's rays in a yellow glare which is irritating beyond measure, and which seems as if it would produce insanity by its unchangeableness.