Picture to yourself two precipices three times the height of Niagara, three times the height of the Metropolitan Tower, sheer as a wall of blocked yellow and red masonry, no wider apart than you can shout across, ending in the snows of the Jemez to the right, shut in black basalt walls to the left, forested with the heavy pines to the very edge and down the blocky tiers of rocks and escarpments running into blind angles where rain and sun have dyed the terra cotta pumice blood-red. And picture the face of the cliff under your feet, the sides of the massive rocks eroded to the shapes of tents and tepees and beehives, pigeon-holed by literally thousands of windows and doors and arched caves and winding recess and portholes--a city of the dead, silent as the dead, old almost as time! The wind came soughing up the canyon with the sound of the sea. The note of a lonely song sparrow broke the silence in a stab. Somewhere, down among the tender green, lining the canyon stream, a mourning dove uttered her sad threnody--then, silence and the soughing wind; then, more silence; then, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have sat down on the edge of the canyon wall and let the palpable past come touching me out of the silence. A community house of some hundreds of rooms lay directly under me in the floor of the valley. This was once a populous city twelve miles long, a city of one long street, with the houses tier on tier above each other, reached by ladders, and steps worn hip-deep in the stone. Where had the people gone; and why? What swept their civilization away? When did the age-old silence fall? Seven thousand people do not leave the city of their building and choice, of their loves and their hates, and their wooing and their weddings, of their birth and their deaths--do not leave without good reason. What was the reason? What gave this place of beauty and security and thrift over to the habitation of bat and wolf? Why did the dead race go? Did they flee panic-stricken, pursued like deer by the Apache and the Ute and the Navajo? Or were they marched out captives, weeping? Or did they fall by the pestilence? Answer who can! Your guess is as good as mine! But there is the sacred ceremonial underground chamber where they worshiped the sacred fire and the plumed serpent, guardian of the springs; where the young boys were taken at time of manhood and instructed in virtue and courage and endurance and cleanliness and reticence. "If thou art stricken, die like the deer with a silent throat," says the adage of the modern Pueblo Indian. "When the foolish speak, keep thou silent." "When thou goest on the trail, carry only a light blanket." Good talk, all of it, for young boys coming to realize themselves and life! And there farther down the valley is the stone circle or dancing floor where the people came down from their cliff to make merry and express in rhythm the emotions which other nations express in poetry and music.