Then, as the Glacial Age had receded and drought began, the cave men were forced to come down from their cliff dwellings and to disperse. Here, too, is another story. There may have been a great cataclysm; for thousands of tons of rock have fallen from the face of the canyon, and the rooms remaining are plainly only back rooms. The Hopi and Moki and Zuni have traditions of the "Heavens raining fire;" and good cobs of corn have been found embedded in what may be solid lava, or fused adobe. Pajarito Plateau, the Spanish called this region--"place of the bird people," who lived in the cliffs like swallows; but thousands of years before the Spanish came, the Stone Age had passed and the cliff people dispersed. * * * * * What in the world am I talking about, and where? That's the curious part of it. If it were in Egypt, or Petrae, or amid the sand-covered columns of Phrygia, every tourist company in the world would be arranging excursions to it; and there would be special chapters devoted to it in the supplementary readers of the schools; and you wouldn't be--well, just _au fait_, if you didn't know; but do you know this wonder-world is in America, your own land? It is less than forty miles from the regular line of continental travel; $6 a single rig out, $14 a double; $1 to $2 a day at the ranch house where you can board as you explore the amazing ancient civilization of our own American Southwest. This particular ruin is in the Frijoles Canyon; but there are hundreds, thousands, of such ruins all through the Southwest in Colorado and Utah and Arizona and New Mexico. By joining the Archaeological Society of Santa Fe, you can go out to these ruins even more inexpensively than I have indicated. * * * * * A general passenger agent for one of the largest transcontinental lines in the Northwest told me that for 1911, where 60,000 people bought round-trip tickets to our own West and back--pleasure, not business--over 120,000 people bought tickets for Europe and Egypt. I don't know whether his figures covered only the Northwest of which he was talking, or the whole continental traffic association; but the amazing fact to me was the proportion he gave--_one_ to our own wonders, to _two_ for abroad. I talked to another agent about the same thing. He thought that the average tourist who took a trip to our own Pacific Coast spent from $300 to $500, while the average tourist who went to Europe spent from $1,000 to $2,000. Many European tourists went at $500; but so many others spent from $3,000 to $5,000, that he thought the average spendings of the tourist to Europe should be put at $1,000 to $2,000. That puts your proportion at a still more disastrous discrepancy--thirty million dollars _versus_ one hundred and twenty million. _The Statist_ of London places the total spent by Americans in Europe at nearer three hundred million dollars than one hundred and twenty million.