I am sitting in one of the caves of the Stone Age. This is not fiction but fact. I am not speculating as to _how_ those folk of neolithic times lived. I am writing in one of the cliff houses _where_ they lived, sitting on the floor with my feet resting on the steps of an entrance stone stairway worn hip-deep through the volcanic rock by the moccasined tread of aeons of ages. Through the cave door, looking for all the world from the outside like a pigeon box, I can see on the floor of the valley a community house of hundreds of rooms, and a sacred _kiva_ or ceremonial chamber where gods of fire and water were invoked, and a circular stone floor where men and women danced the May-pole before Julius Caesar was born, before--if Egyptian archaeologists be correct--the dynasties of the Nile erected Pyramid and Sphinx to commemorate their own oblivion. To my right and left for miles--for twelve miles, to be correct--are thousands of such cave houses against the face of the cliff, as the one in which I now write. Boxed up by the snow-covered Jemez (Hamez) Mountains at one end, with a black basalt gash in the rock at the other end through which roars a mountain torrent and waterfalls too narrow for two men to walk abreast, with vertical walls of yellow pumice straight up and down as if leveled by a giant trowel, in this valley of the Frijoles waters once dwelt a nation, dead and gone before the Spaniards came to America, vanished leaving not the shadow of a record behind long before William the Conqueror crossed to England, contemporaneous, perhaps--for all science knows to the contrary--with that 20,000 B.C. Egyptian desert runner lying in the British Museum.