Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/701

Rh place there is quite a large village, consisting of a series of rooms opening toward the back of the crevice, and with a smooth wall in front, broken only by a few small openings for air and light. Near the middle is the council-chamber, a circular room, as elsewhere, entered only by a very long, low, covered way, or tunnel, built of masonry. This is one of the very few cases where, in similar locations, there was more space than was absolutely essential for mere existence, and the extra space was forthwith devoted to this building, which shows that to it they attached great importance.

Above this village is a crevice similar to the one in which it is built, and this has been utilized as kitchen and storehouse, as is shown by beans and corn which have been found there in a good state of preservation. In the main village whole earthen pots have been found. It is a rare occurrence to find whole vessels, though fragments of them are as plentiful on the mesa as leaves in Vallambrosa's shades.

In another place in this cañon there is a single house high up on the cliffs, which rise still higher above it. It is of two stories. The remarkable feature about it is that the outside is covered with plaster, and painted to resemble the adjacent rock, in red and yellow grays, in the hope of avoiding detection. The insides of the front rooms in each story also are plastered and colored a deep maroon red, with a dingy-white band. Adjacent to it is a cistern to catch and hold the water which trickles down the rocks.

The Casa del Eco is one of the largest of these cliff villages. It is in the cañon of the San Juan, about twelve miles below the mouth of the Montezuma, a dry cañon which heads in the Sierra Abajo. The cañon-cliffs at this place are about two hundred feet high. A vertical and horizontal section of the cliff both present the form of a semi-circle; in other words, there is here a cave, in the form of a hemisphere. Along an horizontal curve which passes through its deepest part is a stratum of harder rock, ten feet wide at its widest part, making a projecting shelf, on which is perched the single row of houses of which the town consists. Here the people were entirely protected from attack from above, as the overhanging wall of the cliff projects at least one hundred feet. Below, the slope is extremely steep, making approach in that direction slow and tedious; and, finally, the shelf on which the town stands projects so far that it is wellnigh impossible to get on it without outside aid. The main building of the town, the council-house, is, in this case, rectangular, forty feet by ten, and twelve feet high. It is built in two stories, and each is divided into three rooms. The floor-beams of the second story are of the cedar so common in the country at present, prepared merely by stripping off the bark. Whether these houses had roofs, it is impossible to say. In so protected a situation as this they would be of little use.

In the mortar of these houses there has been detected the imprint