Picture to yourself a precipice face from 300 to 700 feet high, literally punctured with tiny porthole windows and doll house open cave doors. It is sunset. The rocks of these box-canyons in the Southwest are of a peculiar wine-colored red and golden ocher, or else dead gray and gypsum white. Owing to the great altitude--some of the ruins are 9,000 feet above sea level, 1,000 above valley bottom--the atmosphere has that curious quality of splitting white light into its seven prismatic hues. Artists of the Southwestern School account for this by the fact of desert dust being a silt fine as flour, which acts like crystal or glass in splitting the rays of white light into its prismatic colors; but this hardly explains these high box-canyons, for there is no dust here. My own theory (please note, it is only a theory and may be quite wrong) is that the air is so rare at altitudes above 6,000 feet, so rare and pure that it splits light up, if not in seven prismatic colors, then in elementary colors that give the reds and purples and fire tints predominance. Anyway, at sunset and sunrise, these box-canyons literally swim in a glory of lavender and purple and fiery reds. You almost fancy it is a fire where you can dip your hand and not be burned; a sea in which spirits, not bodies, swim and move and have their being; a sea of fiery rainbow colors. The sunset fades. The shadows come down like invisible wings. The twilight deepens. The stars prick through the indigo blue of a desert sky like lighted candles; and there flames up in the doorway of cavern window and door the deep red of juniper and cedar log glow in the fireplaces at the corner of each room. The mourning dove utters his plaintive wail. You hear the yap-yap of fox and coyote far up among the big timbers between you and the snows. Then a gong rings. (Gong? In a metal-less age? Yes, the gong is a flint bar struck by the priest with a bone clapper.) The dancers come down out of the caves to the dancing floors in the middle of the narrow canyon. You can see the dancing rings yet, where the feet of a thousand years have beaten the raw earth hard. Men only dance. These are not sex dances. They are dances of thanks to the gods for the harvest home of corn; or for victory. The gong ceases clapping. The campfires that scent the canyon with juniper smells, flicker and fade and die. The rhythmic beat of the feet that dance ceases and fades in the darkness. That was ten thousand years agone. Where are the races that danced to the beat of the priest's clapper gong? I wakened one morning in one of the Frijoles caves to the mournful wail of the turtle dove; and there came back that old prophecy--it used to give me cold shivers down my spine as a child--that the habitat of the races who fear not God shall be the haunt of bittern and hoot owl and bat and fox. * * * * *