"Still passing plains which had once been occupied,[148] we saw to our left the 'Casa de Montezuma.' I rode to it, and found the remains of the walls of four buildings, and the piles of earth showing where many others had been. One of the buildings was still quite complete, as a ruin; the others had all crumbled, but a few pieces of broken wall remaining. The large casa was fifty feet by forty, and had been four stories high; but the floors and roof had long since been burnt out. The charred ends of the cedar joists were still in the wall. I examined them and found they had not been cut with a steel instrument. The joists were round sticks about two feet in diameter. There were four entrances--north, south, east, and west,--the doors about four feet by two; the rooms as below, and had the same arrangement in each story. There was no sign of a fire-place in the building. The lower story was filled with rubbish, and above it was the open sky. The walls were four feet thick at the bottom, and had a curved inclination inwards to the top. The house was built of a sort of white earth and pebbles, probably containing lime, which abounded on the ground adjacent. The walls had been smoothed outside, and plastered inside; and the surface still remained firm, although it was evident it had been exposed to great heat from the fire. Some of the rooms did not open to all the rest, but had a hole a foot in diameter to look through; in other places were smaller holes. About two hundred yards from this building was a mound, in a circle one hundred yards around the mound. The centre was a hollow, twenty-five yards in diameter, with two ramps or slopes going down to its bottom. It was probably a well, now partly filled up. A similar one was seen near Mount Dallas. "A few yards further, in the same direction, northward, was a terrace one hundred yards by seventy, about five feet high. Upon this was a pyramid about eight feet high, twenty-five yards square at the top. From this, sitting on my horse, I could overlook the vast plain lying north-east and west, on the left bank of the Gila. The ground in view was about fifteen miles--all of which, it would seem, had been irrigated by the waters of the Gila. I picked up a broken crystal of quartz in one of these piles. Leaving the casa I turned towards the Pimos, and travelling at random over the plain (now covered with mezquite), the piles of earth and pottery showed for miles in every direction. I also found the remains of a zequia (a canal for irrigation) which followed the range of houses for miles. It had been very large." _The Pimos._--Without at present fixing their locality, it is sufficient for the sake of showing the character of their civilization, to make the following extracts, directly from Mr. Squier's paper on New Mexico and California, but indirectly, or in the way of first-hand evidence, from Lieutenant Emory:--