Within a short radius of Santa Fé, one can trace all the successive steps in the history of the Pueblo Indian. We go furthest back at Rito de los Frijoles, where a glance half way up a perpendicular cliff reveals black spots of pin-head size. An arduous climb up rough ladders and steps notched in crumbling yellow tufa shows these holes as large caverns hollowed by water under the shelving roof of the soft rock, and built up with a masonry which today would easily command ten dollars a day and a forty-eight hour week. “The Cloud City, Acoma,” on the Arizona road is built atop a high mesa, facing the still higher Enchanted Mesa, now peopled only by troubled ghosts. Doubtless the first Indians to advance from cave dwellings to mesas felt as emancipated as the first New Englander who left the old homestead for a modern apartment-house. Further east the rock-bastioned villages of the Hopis still carry on the customs of their kin, if not their ancestors. At Taos and Laguna the timid Pueblos finally ventured down to the ground, but retained the style of the mesas and cliff dwellings, of terraced receding houses, several stories high. The final and most modern adaptation are the one-story, squat little adobe houses of the river pueblos, whose dwellers have shaken off entirely the ancestral fear, and raise corn and alfalfa, melons and apricots on the rich irrigated soil. The journey to Frijoles is worth risking a fall over precipices as one dashes over switchbacks of incomparable dizziness on roadbeds of unsanctified roughness. From Buckman, if the bridge is not washed away by the floods, like most bridges about Santa Fe, the ascent starts to the neat little, green little Rito de los Frijoles,--Bean Valley is its unpoetical English. No motorist should undertake this trip with his own car unless he thinks quickly, knows his machine thoroughly, and is inoculated against “horizontal fever.” The road climbs past orange hills up blue distances, through warmly scented forests of scrub piñon, with a vista of the river far below. At the top the car must be abandoned, for nothing wider than a mule can manage the descent into the canyon. [Illustration: CAVE DWELLINGS IN THE PUMICE WALLS OF CANYON DE LOS FRIJOLES, SANTA FE.]