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Show 274 THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE ward inch by inch with his hands, and depending upon friction to keep him from slipping. Once on top, he tied a rope to the butt of a stunted tree, and, with this to hold to, the others clambered up without difficulty. A moment later we were in the cave, looking out upon a scene never before beheld by human eyes; never before, because ledges had crashed down and generations of trees had grown and rotted since the last of the ancients departed. CHILDREN S BODIES PACKED LIKE SARDINES IN A GRAVE Turns in the canyon cut off the view to the left and right, with the effect that below us lay a vast pit, its slopes cluttered with jagged blocks of stone and dotted here and there with gnarled cedar trees. At the very bottom, along the drainage course, there was a crooked line of very large spruces, so distant that they seemed like parlor Christmas trees. Smaller conifers fringed the rim rock opposite us, and above its towering red expanse there showed a ribbon of clear blue sky (see page 293). There were a few intact rooms at one end of the cave, fallen masonry covering most of its area, and retaining walls, bastionlike, at the front of it. Where two of these met at a sharp angle, a pair of mummified feet protruded from the debris. The tightly folded body was wrapped in a feather-cloth blanket. Three slender poles lay lengthwise above it and three shorter ones in the opposite direction. Upon these was spread a mat made of reed stems, which in turn was covered by one of neatly plaited rushes. On the left wrist there was a bead bracelet composed of lignite disks one-twenty- fifth of an inch in diameter, and at the right of the head were a pottery bowl and drinking vessel. In a niche at the back of the cave were two handsome vessels- a large one, a dull-white, flat-topped vase, with vivid black decoration; the other a red, spherical canteen provided with two loop handles, and a bail braided from strands of human hair. Some matron in the old days had filled these vessels with dried sunflower petals and hidden them away against the future- a future which for her never dawned. The largest cave in Canon del Muerto was three miles below our camp. It was a blustery morning late in October when we set out, each with a backload of tools, cameras, and what not, to begin work there. On the way we were not permitted to forget a baconless breakfast, for every now and then our own footprints blotted out those of the bear that during the previous night had devoured our last slab of meat which had been left hanging from the limb of a tree just outside the tent door. Once within the great cave, however, so minor a point soon passed from mind. Near the western end of the 1,100-foot shelter the corner of a slab cyst like those in Mummy Cave was visible in the bank of a pit opened by some relic-hunter. I thrust my shovel into the debris which filled it, and when I raised the blade there was the skull of a child upon it. The cyst was triangular, the sides being three feet in length and the base three and a half feet. It appeared to have been completely filled with the bodies of infants and small children. Each one was wrapped in a padlike mass of soft fiber made from leaves of the yucca plant and shrouded either in a fur or feather-cloth blanket. They were packed in as tightly as sardines in a tin. After I had removed the 14th, my fingers touched a corrugated surface which at first I thought to be the ribs of a shrunken body. When the dust was brushed away it proved to be the side of a basket so large that had it been two inches greater in diameter it could not have been placed in the cyst. Inside it were the skeletons of four more children, two of them with bracelets on the left wrist, each a strand of white beads interspersed with pendants of abalone shell. AN ANCIENT GRAVE, ROBBER LEAVES A CLEW The neighboring areas were literally full of graves. In several the bodies were so well preserved that the features appeared as lifelike as those of the mummies of the Pharaohs. When we lifted the one shown in the accompanying illustration |
