“Look,” said somebody, pointing. Mr. Wetherell smiled. To our right, sheltering us with its six hundred feet of red wall rose a cliff, curved half-way up like an inverted bowl, and blackened with streaks where water had once run. The same water had carved the bowl, and had it worked awhile longer it would have bored through the cliff and made a natural bridge. As it was, it formed a simple but perfect shelter for a large cliff city, so completely the color of the cliff that but for the black window holes, we should never have found them for ourselves. With all the joy of discoverers we speedily climbed the precipitous bank to the narrow shelf on which the ancient city was built. Strung together on their precarious ledge like beads on a necklace were rows of rooms, compared to which a kitchenette in a New York apartment would be spacious. Above them were second and third stories, the ceilings long ago fallen, and only a few decayed piñon _vegas_ to show where they had been. On one building the tumbled masonry exposed a framework of willow wattles. A thousand years before, perhaps, some Indian had cut the saplings fresh from the brook where we had just bathed. The great stone slabs of the altars and the cedar beams must have been dragged up from below,--a stupendous work of patient human ants. In the fine, crumbly floor dust, we found innumerable bits of pottery, painted in the early red, black and white, and fragments of the still earlier thumb-nail. Toby tirelessly collected armfuls of them, and tied them in bandana handkerchiefs. The place had hardly been excavated. We pawed the dust, each believing we might discover some souvenir the Smithsonian would envy us, and ethnologists refer to wistfully in their reports, yet somehow, we did not. But many interesting things came to light, feathers twisted together into ropes, obsidian arrow-heads, sticks notched by a stone adze, grinding stones such as the Hopis use today, and the altar stones found in each apartment. No wonder their builders worshipped, living so near Heaven. These ruins, called Beta-Takin, or “Hillside House” were well named. Above was only the deep blue sky, framed in the smooth red arch that roofed these swallows’ nests. Below were steep slopes of crumbling sandstone, the glowing flowers near the river, and beyond, castellated peaks of bold outline. I climbed with caution to the furthest tip of the crescent town, and my traitor knees began to crumple like paper. I had suddenly begun to wonder, at the wrong moment, whether any cliff dwelling babies had ever fallen over that edge.