The river was constantly turning and twisting upon itself, looking back over its shoulder through gateways of sheer cliffs, smooth as if someone had frosted them with chocolate icing. In the narrow space between them a little Paradise of shade and sunlight, grass and blossoming fruit trees, ran like a parti-colored ribbon. The Navajos have planted peach trees in this fertile strip. Graceful cottonwoods make an emerald shelter, and brooks branch into the central stream. The river spreads out in great shallows at will, with rank grass growing knee-high at its edge. Rocks like cathedrals stand guardian at every turn, so close together sometimes that the sky is held prisoner in a wedge of blue. Patches of rough gardens cut into the flowered banks gave us our first intimation that the Paradise sheltered an Adam and an Eve. Then we saw wattled huts of willow, the summer hogans of Navajos, airier and more graceful than their mud plastered winter huts. On turning a corner where the receding river had already left a long, fertile island, we came on an encampment of these brightly dressed, alert Arabs, with their keen faces and winged poise. Horses and sheep were pastured near, and under the trees several women had erected frames on which were stretched half-finished rugs. Others, in their full gathered skirts with gay flounces, rode their horses to water as easily as if they wore breeches and puttees. Under the cliffs they looked like tiny dots. This canyon is the favorite summer resort of neighboring Indians, and no wonder. Here for a pleasant season they can forget the arid wastes of the desert in their apricot orchards, and grow without travail their corn and beans and melons. We had scarcely left this gypsy encampment before we saw mute evidence that the place had been beloved of more than one generation of Indians. Nearly at the top of a rock clustered a few cliff houses, mere crannies in the wall, and all along that unbroken cliff were little, scared shelters, no bigger than mousetraps, watching with scared eyes as no doubt their inmates did long ago, the approaches to their stronghold. Tradition has it that the architects of these houses were ancestors of the Hopis, driven here partly by enemies, partly by drought, but also by the inspiration of their medicine men. It is not strange these empty nests should be arresting sights, dating back to the antiquity when the Hopis could turn into snakes, and the king’s son and his snake bride followed the star which led them to Walpi. They may have inhabited the very eyrie we saw. A tiny, bridal apartment it was, so inaccessible at the top of this slab of rock that only a snake could climb to it. Surely no entirely human feet would dare venture those heights. [Illustration: CLIFF-DWELLINGS, CANYON DE CHELLEY, ARIZONA.]