OCR Text |
Show 13 forty feet above the river, a bed of shale occurs in the sandstone, which, being easily disintegrated, has been weathered out and carried away, leaving a sort of horizontal groove some four feet high and from four to six feet deep. In this a row of diminutive houses has been built. Three of these are almost perfect, having a fresh new look that certainly belies their age. Four others are much more decayed, and fragments of wall only cling to the cliffs. They have been made to occupy the full height and depth of the crevice, so that when one reaches it at the only accessible point, he is between two houses and must pass through these to get at the others. The doorways are quite small and bear no evidence of the fitting or hanging of doors; and the windows, of which a number open to the front, are but a few inches square. The walls are strongly built and are from eight to ten inches thick. The stones are small, dressed roughly on the outside, and laid in mortar. In many places, the heavier seams of mortar have been chinked with bits of pottery and small flakes of sandstone. The marks of the masons' pick are as fresh as if made within a few years, and the fine, hard mod- mortar, which has been applied with the bare hands, still retains impressions of the miuute markings of the cuticle of the fingers. The house at the left hand in the drawing has two apartments, the farthest of which has a curved wall conforming with the rounded end of the crevice floor, which, beyond this for some distance, is broken down. Specimens of the moitar and of the dressed stone were procured from tbis house and brought east. Below the middle part of this line of booses, on an irregular projection, are the remains of a number of walls, in snch a state of ruin, however, that the character of the original structure could not be made out. In digging among the debris of this min, I came upon a bin of charred corn, in which the forms of the ears * ere quite perfect. It seems to be of a variety similar to that cultivated by the tribes of the neighborhood at the present time. That this corn had been placed there by the ancient occupants seems-probable from the fact that it occupied a sort of basement apartment or cellar, and had been buried beneath the fallen walls of the superstructures. Imbedded in this mass of charcoal, I found the very perfect specimen of stone implement figured in plate XIV ( figure 3). Many large fragments of the ordinary painted pottery were also picked up here. A certain new look about portions of this group leads one to suspect that it cannot boast of great antiquity; but it is very difficult to calculate-the effects of age upon walls so perfectly protected and in such a climate. The group given in figure 2 is of a much more interesting and remarkable character. It was first observed from the trail, far below and nearly three- fourths of a mile away. From this point, by the aid of a * field- glass, the sketch given in the plate was made, do cleverly are the houses hidden away in the dark recesses, and so very like the surrounding cliffs in color, that I had almost completed the sketch of the upper boose before the lower or " sixteen- windowed" one was detected. They treat least eight hundred feet above the river. The lower five hundred • eet is of rough cliff- broken slope, the remainder of massive bedded fendstone full of wind- worn niches, crevices, and caves. Within one-jtandred feet of the cliff- top, set deep in a great niche, with arched, over-tanging root', is the upper house, its front wall built along the very brink of a sheer precipice. Thirty feet below, in a similar but less* remarkable niche, is the larger house, with its long line of apertures,. * hich I afterward found to be openings intended rather for the insertion of beams than for windows. |