Cliff House—Mancos Cañon.
The first stone building particularly described, and one of the most wonderful found during the trip, is that shown in the cut. The most wonderful thing about it was its position in the face of the cliff several hundred feet above the bottom, on a ledge ten feet wide and twenty feet long, accessible only by hard climbing with fingers and toes inserted in crevices, or during the upper part of the ascent by steps cut in the steep slope by the aborigines. The cliff above overhangs the ledge, leaving a vertical space of fifteen feet. The building occupies only half the length of the ledge, and is now twelve feet high in front, leaving it uncertain whether it originally reached the overhanging cliff, or had an independent roof. The ground plan shows a front room six by nine feet, and two rear rooms each five by seven, projecting on one side so as to form an L. There were two stories, as is shown by the holes in the walls and fragments of floor-timbers. A doorway, twenty by thirty inches and two feet above the floor, led from one side of the front room to the esplanade, and there was also a window about a foot square in the lower story, and a window or doorway in the second story corresponding to that below. Opposite this upper opening was a smaller one opening into a reservoir holding about two hogsheads and a half, and formed by a semicircular wall joining the cliff and the main wall of the house. A line of projecting wooden pegs led from the window down into the cistern. Small doorways afforded communication between the apartments. The front portion was built of square and smoothly faced sandstone blocks of different sizes, up to fifteen inches long and eight inches thick, laid in a hard grayish-white mortar, very compact and hard, but cracked on the surface like adobe mortars. The rear portions were of rough stones in mortar, and the partition walls were like the exterior front ones, and seemed to have been rubbed smooth after they were laid.
The interior of the front rooms was plastered with a coating of a firm cement an eighth of an inch thick, colored red, and having a white band eight inches wide extending round the bottom like a base-board. There were no other signs of decoration. The floor was the natural rock of the ledge, evened up in some places with cement. The lintel of the upper doorway or window was of small straight cedar sticks laid close together, and supporting the masonry above; the other lintels seem to be of stone. A very wonderful feature of this structure was that the front wall rests on the rounded edge of the precipice, sloping at an angle of forty-five degrees, and the esplanade, or platform, at the side of the house was also leveled up by three abutments resting on this slope, where "it would seem that a pound's weight might slide them off."
TOWERS ON THE RIO MANCOS.
Ground Plan—Mancos Tower.
Round Tower—Mancos Cañon.