We were struck by the many isolated dwellings we came upon. Unlike the extensive cities at Beta-Takin, at Walnut Canyon, and Mesa Verde, these must have been intended for single families. Between the various groups is a distance sometimes of a half mile, sometimes a mile. The largest and by far the most impressive group in the canyon is Casa Blanca, the White House of some ancient dignitary occupying a commanding position looking far down the valley in both directions. The river cuts deep and narrow here, with shallow islands between. Above it by twenty feet is a bank where crumbling walls, painted with prehistoric pictographs of birds and animals, stand under the shadow of Casa Blanca. The rock is blood red when the sun strikes it, and purple in the shadow. Seventy feet up, the whitewashed walls of this ancient mansion are startlingly, romantically prominent, looking fresh enough to have been painted yesterday. How the former dwellers reached Casa Blanca is a puzzle. They must have had the aid of ladders and niches in the rock. Today it is completely inaccessible, except to Douglas Fairbanks, who once bounded lightly up its side. A day’s ride down the left fork, overlooking a vale meant for stately pleasure domes, is the Cave of the Mummies. This community of cliff dwellings is so called because one startled explorer found in it seven mummies, in perfect preservation. The cave can be reached by diligent climbing, and aside from all interest in things past, the view down that graceful, twisting valley is worth losing many hours of breath. We camped that night under a red monolith big enough to bury a nation beneath it. The beauty of that scene is past my exhausted powers of description. The campfire and the river, the smooth cliffs penetrating the black sky with such strength and suavity, were the same essentials as we found at the Rainbow Bridge, yet with all the difference in the world. Grandeur was here, but not the rugged hurly-burly of Titans which overwhelmed and dwarfed us there. Where the San Juan tumbles and froths, and bursts over boulders, struggling and tumultuous, the de Chelley river glides peacefully, widening about pretty shallows and quiet islands. In Nonnezoshe Boco, the rocks are tortured into strange shapes, twisted and wrung like wet clay; here they are planed smooth and not tossed about helter-skelter, but rhythmically repeating the pattern of the stream.