By the time he reached the upper landing of the wall of the pueblo it was sunset, and he paused to gaze at a magnificent landscape, the replica of the one which he had seen at sunrise.  There were buttes, valleys, and canons, the vast and lofty plateaus of the north, the ranges of the Navajo country, the Sierra del Carrizo, and the ice peaks of Monte San Francisco.  It was sublime, savage, beautiful, horrible.  It seemed a revelation from some other world.  It was a nightmare of nature.

Clara met him on the landing with the smile which she now often gave him.  “I was anxious about you,” she said.  “You were too weak to go down there.  You look very tired.  Do come and eat, and then rest.  You will make yourself sick.  I was quite anxious about you.”

It was a delightful repetition.  How his heart and his eyes thanked her for being troubled for his sake!  He was so cheered that in a moment he did not seem to be tired at all.  He could have watched all that night, if it had been necessary for her safety, or even for her comfort.  The soul certainly has a great deal to do with the body.

While our travellers sleep, let us glance at the singular people among whom they have found refuge.

It is said hesitatingly, by scholars who have not yet made comparative studies of languages, that the Moquis are not red men, like the Algonquins, the Iroquois, the Lenni-Lenape, the Sioux, and in general those whom we know as Indians.  It is said, moreover, that they are of the same generic stock with the Aztecs of Mexico, the ancient Peruvians, and all the other city-building peoples of both North and South America.

It was an evil day for the brown race of New Mexico when horses strayed from the Spanish settlements into the desert, and the savage red tribes became cavalry.  This feeble civilization then received a more cruel shock than that which had been dealt it by the storming columns of the conquistadors.  The horse transformed the Utes, Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos from snapping-turtles into condors.  Thenceforward, instead of crawling in slow and feeble bands to tease the dense populations of the pueblos, they could come like a tornado, and come in a swarm.  At no time were the Moquis and their fellow agriculturists and herdsmen safe from robbery and slaughter.  Such villages as did not stand upon buttes inaccessible to horsemen, and such as did not possess fertile lands immediately under the shelter of their walls, were either abandoned or depopulated by slow starvation.

It is thus that we may account for many of the desolate cities which are now found in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.  Not of course for all; some, we know, were destroyed by the early Spaniards; others may have been forsaken because their tillable lands became exhausted; others doubtless fell during wars between different tribes of the brown race.  But the cavalry of the desert must necessarily have been a potent instrument of destruction.