House Ruin on Green River, Utah.
Photograph by L. H. Johnson.
One hardly can believe that a large number of these people once had their villages and their farms east of the Mississippi, where the factory and the mowing-machine now hold sway, but in the South-west wherever we tread we discover some indication of the old population: a trail, an irrigating ditch, a tree for a ladder, house walls, rock pictures, etc., and often, far from the tumult of the modern world, we seem almost to catch the sigh of a voice, or the rustle of a blanket, in the breeze that whispers through the old piñon tree. On the East Mesa of the Mokis we appear to command a clear perspective, for the modern world is not evident. I always seemed there to be far out of it. Through their windows we can well see into the past and reconstruct the wilderness. Sitting on the housetop at the day's end, the surf of our restless civilisation beating against the far horizon, the vanished sun burnishing with a wondrous spread of gold the whole high vault of the Arizona sky, we drowsily follow the fading light as it dissolves in a sea-like mist the plains so far below, till they no longer have being but float from its firm moorings, the great headland—villages, rocks, and all—drifting it backward through phantasmal centuries. And out of the strange houses around us, where the mothers sing their lullabies, arise the forgotten hosts of other days, with the cry of the chase and the clash of battle, as if like Don Roderick we had unlocked the fateful gates of the Forbidden Tower and were about to be overwhelmed. Suddenly, amidst the turmoil of that ancient throng we discover a greater commotion. It is the European with his hand of iron, shooting as he marches, while through the smoke of his gun rises, like the Spectre of the Brocken, a hideous companion he does not see. It is the dismal Shadow of Death, smiting right and left; and they walk on together, ever over corpses.
