The terraces, as we have stated, were faced with partially dressed stone. They were in many places quite broad, and were cultivated everywhere with admirable care, presenting long green lines of corn fields or of peach orchards. Half-way up the ascent was a platform of more than ordinary spaciousness which contained a large reservoir, built of chipped stone strongly cemented, and brimming with limpid water. From this cistern large earthen pipes led off in various directions to irrigate the terraces below.
"It seems to me that we are discovering America," exclaimed Aunt Maria, her face scarlet with exercise and enthusiasm.
Presently she asked, in full faith that she was approaching a metropolis, "What is the name of the city?"
"This must be Tegua," replied Thurstane. "Tegua is the most eastern of the Moqui pueblos. There are three on this bluff. Mooshaneh and two others are on a butte to the west. Oraybe is further north."
"What a powerful confederacy!" said Aunt Maria. "The United States of the Moquis!"
After a breathless ascent of at least eight hundred feet, they reached the undulated, barren, rocky surface of a plateau. Here the whole population of Tegua had collected; and for the first time the visitors saw Moqui women and children. Aunt Maria was particularly pleased with the specimens of her own sex; she went into ecstasies over their gentle physiognomies and their well-combed, carefully braided, glossy hair; she admired their long gowns of black woollen, each with a yellow stripe around the waist and a border of the same at the bottom.
"Such a sensible costume!" she said. "So much more rational and convenient than our fashionable fripperies!"
Another fact of great interest was that the Moquis were lighter complexioned than Indians in general. And when she discovered a woman with fair skin, blue eyes, and yellow hair—one of those albinos who are found among the inhabitants of the pueblos—she went into an excitement which was nothing less than ethnological.
"These are white people," she cried, losing sight of all the brown faces. "They are some European race which colonized America long before that modern upstart, Columbus. They are undoubtedly the descendants of the Northmen who built the old mill at Newport and sculptured the Dighton Rock."
"There is a belief," said Thurstane, "that some of these pueblo people, particularly those of Zuni, are Welsh. A Welsh prince named Madoc, flying before the Saxons, is said to have reached America. There are persons who hold that the descendants of his followers built the mounds in the Mississippi Valley, and that some of them became the white Mandans of the upper Missouri, and that others founded this old Mexican civilization. Of course it is all guess-work. There's nothing about it in the Regulations."