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Show 156 BY PATH AND TRAIL. assisted by a civilized guide, while all history proves that races at one time in possession of civilization have passed over that territory and descended into the gloomy depths of savagery, where many of them yet remain. In Arizona, at least, it was impossible for the Indian to lift himself out of his degradation, for when he began his rude cultivation of the land, the ferocious mountain tribes swooped down upon him and drove him into the desert or to the inaccessible cliffs. Following the instinct of self- preservation, he built his stone hut on lofty ledges or scooped from the friable mountain side, fifty, one hundred, two hundred feet in air, a cave which served for an observatory and a refuge for his wife and children. With a rope ladder, twisted from the viscera of the grey wolf, or the hide of the mountain lion, he climbed down from his lofty perch, re turning with food and water for his miserable family. Thus began the now famous " cliff- dwellings," which seventy years ago many of our learned antiquarians thought were the dens of an extinct species, half animal and half man. Seeing and knowing nothing of the rope which was always lifted by the woman when the man was at home or on the hunt, the deduction was quite natural that no human being could scale the face of the almost perpendicular cliff. The Moqui Indians still inhabit these strange rock lairs on the northern side of the Colorado Chiquito. There is no tribe of aborigines left upon the earth, there ' s no region of the world, more deserving of examination than the Moquis and the mysterious land they occupy. Here at the village of Huaipi, on a mesa or table land surrounded by sand dunes and amorphous boulders of old red sandstone, is held every second year the mystic |