Defensive walls.
Further up the mountain the deer-trail theory is abandoned—at least so far as recent times are concerned. The stones are worn too smooth, the larger ones have been pushed aside by something more intelligent than a mule-deer’s hoof; and in one place the trail seems to have been built up on the descending side. There is not the slightest evidence, either by rub upon the rocks, or overturned stones, or scrape in the gravel, that any living thing has passed up this pathway for many years; and yet the trail is a distinct line of lighter colored stone stretching ahead of me. It is a path worn in the rocks, and there is no grass or vine or weed to obliterate it. It leads on and up to the saddle of the mountain. There is a crevasse or chasm breaking through this saddle which might have been bridged at one time with mesquite trunks, but is now to be leaped if one would reach the summit. It is narrow only in one place and this is just where the trail happens to run. Across it, on the upper side, there is a horseshoe shaped enclosure of stone. It is only a few feet in diameter, and the upper layers of stone have fallen; but the little wall still stands as high as one’s waist. Could this have been a sentinel box used to guard the passage of the trail at this place?
The summit.
Higher and still higher until at last the mountain broadens into a flat top. I am so eager to gain the height and am expecting so much that at first I overlook what is before me. Gradually I make out a long parapet of loose stone on the trail side of the mountain which joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. A conclusion is instantly jumped at, for the imagination will not make haste slowly under such circumstances. These are the ruins of a once fortified camp.
The fortified camp.
I wander about the flat top of the mountain and slowly there grows into recognizable form a great rectangle enclosed by large stones placed about two feet apart. There is no doubt about the square and in one corner of it there seems an elevated mound covered with high-piled stones that would indicate a place for burials. But not a trace of pottery or arrow-heads; and about the stones only faint signs of fire which might have come from volcanic action as readily as from domestic hearths. Upon the side of one of the large rocks are some characters in red ochre; and on the ground near a pot-hole in the rock, something that the imagination might torture into a rude pestle for grinding maize.
Nature’s reclamations.
The traces of human activity are slight. Nature has been wearing them away and reclaiming her own on the mountain top. Grease wood is growing where once a floor was beaten hard as iron by human feet; out of the burial mound rises a giant sahuaro whose branching arms give the look of the cross; and beside the sahuaro rests a tall yucca with four feet of clustering bellflowers swinging from its top.
Mountain dwellers.
Invading hosts.