Thea’s life at the Ottenburg ranch¹ was simple and full of light, like the days themselves. She awoke every morning when the first fierce shafts² of sunlight darted³ through the curtainless windows of her room at the ranch house. After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went down to the canyon⁴. Usually she did not return until sunset.  
Panther Canyon was like a thousand others—one of those abrupt⁵ fissures⁶ with which the earth in the Southwest is riddled⁷; so abrupt that you might walk over the edge of any one of them on a dark night and never know what had happened to you. This canyon headed on the Ottenburg ranch, about a mile from the ranch house, and it was accessible only at its head. The canyon walls, for the first two hundred feet below the surface, were perpendicular⁸ cliffs, striped with even-running strata⁹ of rock. From there on to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were shelving, and lightly fringed with piñons and dwarf¹⁰ cedars¹¹. The effect was that of a gentler canyon within a wilder one. The dead city lay at the point where the perpendicular outer wall ceased and the V-shaped inner gorge¹² began. There a stratum¹³ of rock, softer than those above, had been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like a deep groove¹⁴ running along the sides of the canyon. In this hollow (like a great fold in the rock) the Ancient People had built their houses of yellowish stone and mortar¹⁵. The over-hanging cliff above made a roof two hundred feet thick. The hard stratum below was an everlasting¹⁶ floor. The houses stood along in a row, like the buildings in a city block, or like a barracks.
 
In both walls of the canyon the same streak¹⁷ of soft rock had been washed out, and the long horizontal groove had been built up with houses. The dead city had thus two streets, one set in either cliff, facing each other across the ravine, with a river of blue air between them.
 
The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these two streets went on for four miles or more, interrupted by the abrupt turnings of the gorge, but beginning again within each turn. The canyon had a dozen of these false endings near its head. Beyond, the windings¹⁸ were larger and less perceptible, and it went on for a hundred miles, too narrow, precipitous, and terrible for man to follow it. The Cliff Dwellers²⁰ liked wide canyons²¹, where the great cliffs caught the sun. Panther Canyon had been deserted²² for hundreds of years when the first Spanish missionaries²³ came into Arizona, but the masonry²⁴ of the houses was still wonderfully firm; had crumbled²⁵ only where a landslide²⁶ or a rolling boulder²⁷ had torn it.
 
All the houses in the canyon were clean with the cleanness of sun-baked, wind-swept places, and they all smelled of the tough little cedars that twisted themselves into the very doorways²⁸. One of thes............