| OCR Text |
Show 266 WESTERN WILDS. the base of the highest cliffs, where the foot- hills begin, but so far up that most of them can not be reached by horses from below; and even most of their little fields are hidden among the foot- hills, and only to be found from above. From the general level of the plain t6 the flat top of the mesa I estimate at a thousand feet. Half of this rise is by a succession of rolling sand ridges, and then we come to a perpendicular cliff, only surmountable by these rock- hewn galleries. The community owns neither horses nor cattle ; nothing but goats, and equally agile burros, can surmount the obstacles of such a situation. We entered upon the ascent in a hot and narrow pass between two sand ridges, and soon reached the first spring, below which was a suc-cession of walled fields. Each field was about three rods wide and six long, and contained some three hundred hills of corn; they were built up against the sand ridge, a stone wall four or five feet high forming at once the division for one and support for the dirt in the next, the fields rising in a succession of terraces. The feeble stream was exhausted before it passed the second field, and it is only in the night that the lower ones can be irrigated. Farther down, where there is no water, the Moqui digs a hole in the sand eighteen o. r twenty inches deep, and plants his corn where a slight moisture has perco-lated from above. We passed the slope, and were about to enter on the gallery road, when a Moqui shouted to us from directly over-head, and in obedience to his directions, though at the imminent risk of our necks, the guide turned down a rocky foot- path to another gal-lery. A few steps showed us that a vast sand- rock had fallen across the other road, and a new one had been built. As \ ve turned the last groove in the gallery, and, almost before we were aware of it, the houses looking so much like stone, we were right in the first town, all the men of which seemed to be absent. At Defiance I was told to ask for Chino, the Capitan of this mesa, before I talked to any one else ; so I shouted to call out some one. A woman came on top of the nearest house, and seeing me immediately set up a cry of jokow ! jokow! Then from every house women and children, with occasionally a man or good- sized boy, came running on to the house- tops and down - the ladders to the street, while the cry went ahead from house to house, jokow! jokow! jokow! A population of several hundred was soon crowding about me, or gazing in astonish-ment from the house- tops ; the women were chattering and exclaiming, and the children when I rode near a house yelling with fright, and altogether we were creating a decided sensation. Again I called for Chino, and a dozen boys jumped into the road and ran along the |
