True, men have been here, some few poking into the dust of
ancient ruins, more seeking minerals, and now and then one, fleeing the
law, to be followed relentlessly by such as Roderick Norton. And yet
there is the evidence, if one looks, that this desolate, shunned land
once had its teeming tribes and its green fields.
Virginia and Roderick, having made their hazardous way down the cliffs
and to their horses in silence, found their tongues loosened as they
rode westward in the soft dawn. Virginia put her questions and he, as
best he could, answered them. She asked eagerly of the old
cliff-dwellers and he shrugged his shoulders. Aztecs, were they?
Toltecs? What? _Quien sabe_! They were a people of mystery who had
left behind them a silence like that of the desert wastes themselves.
Whence they came, where they went, and why, must long remain questions
with many answers and therefore none at all. But he could tell her a
few things of the ancient civilization . . . and a civilization it
truly was . . . and of the signs left for posterity to puzzle over.
They had builded cities, and the ruins of their pueblos still stand
scattered across the weary, scorched land; they constructed mile after
mile of aqueducts whose lines are followed to-day by reclamation
engineers; they irrigated and cultivated their lands; they made abodes
high up on the mountains, dwelling in caves, enlarging their dwellings,
shaping homes and fortresses and lookouts.
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