A precipitous and dusty trail drops to a refreshing little valley, long and narrow, grown with shady pines, and watered by a brook which was probably the _raison d’être_ for the city so many ages silent as the sphinx and dead as Pompeii. In a beautiful semi-circle, so symmetrical and tiny seen from above that it looks like a fantastic design etched on the valley floor, lie the ruined walls of a city whose people were the first families of North America. It is hard to believe this peacefully remote valley ever echoed the noise of playing children, of gossiping women and barking dogs. The dark-skinned Jamshyd who ruled here left speechless stone walls to crumble under the tread of the wild ass, and whether drought, pestilence or murder drove him and his race forth, forsaking their habitations to the eternal echoes, nobody knows. He was timid, or he would not have plastered his houses like swallows’ nests in the cliff, or huddled them together in this remote canyon, walled in against more aggressive tribes. He was agricultural, for traces of his gardens, dust these centuries, may be found. Shard heaps of pottery designed in the red and black pattern that dates them as from one to two thousand years old, and arrowheads of black obsidian prove he knew the same arts as the Southwestern Indian of today. Each tribal unit, then as now, had its kiva, or underground ceremonial chamber with the altar stone placed exactly as in every kiva in Utah, Colorado or Arizona. Parenthetically, the kiva may have retained its popularity through the sunshiny ages because it offered the men of the tribe a complete refuge from their women-folk. Once down the ladder, they need not pull it after them, for custom forbade and still forbids a squaw of any modesty from acting as if the _kiva_ were within a hundred miles of her. Once inside, the men folk are at liberty to whittle their prayer sticks, gossip, swap stories, and follow whatever rituals men indulge in when alone. It is as bad form for a pueblo woman to invade the kiva as for us to enter a men’s club,--with the difference that no kiva had a ladies’ night. Besides furnishing shelter to the henpecked Benedicts, the kiva became a sort of Y. M. C. A. for the young bucks. In ancient times the bachelors of the tribe slept together in the kiva, their food being left outside the entrance. This very wise provision greatly protected the morals of the young people, forced to live in very close juxtaposition. On the ridge opposite the caves of Frijoles lies an unexplored region believed to be the summer home of the race who lived here so secretly and vanished so mysteriously. In a few years the excavator may discover among the shard heaps at the top of this canyon the reason for the exodus, but at present more is known about lost Atlantis than these ruins in our “rawest” and newest corner of the States.