A city for a thousand cliff dwellers.

Waikato Times, Volume XXII, Issue 1809, 9 February 1884, Page 1 (Supplement)

A city for a thousand cliff dwellers.

FirxY mile 3 West of Winslow, A. T., is a little station called Cosnino. It is suddenly lifted into importance from its proximity to a vast canon*, once the abode o! cliff dwellers. An hour's walk from the station and we stand upon the brink of a chasm so deep that the eye can hardly see its bottom. Actual measurement makes it 2,000 feet deep. The width varies from 200 feet at the bottom to 1,500 at the top. The sides are solid rock, but in layers of perhap3 thirty feet in depth, each layer having a projecting or shelving edge extending from six to twenty feet. It was under the shelving work that the cliff dwellers built their abodes. On the opposite side frem where we stood we counted seven tiers of these dwellings. It is notable tljat none are lower than 200 feet from the bottom. The canon is irregular in its formation, but, from our stand point, we could count more than 200 of these dwellings, and there can ba do doubt that this was a city of many thousand inhabitants. To what age of the world this race belonged, or the character and nature of the people who built these cities, neither history nor tradition gives a trace. We made a perilous descent, visiting several tiers of these houses. The front and side walls are of solid masonry, and in a state of good preservation. Doors, three feet by eighteen inches, still remain, showing that these houses were for the accommodation of a very small race. The opening was small, that it could be quickly closed by its inmates against an invading enemy. The canon was once, no doubt, filled to the depth of 100 feet by running water, for no houses appear balow that level. The approach and retreat of these dwellers were in boat? or canoes. —Correspondence New York Sun.

lii a Stone Forest* And? Fife, while prospecting for wood up along the Colorado River, came upon a petrified forest on the Arizona side of the river. He says it is located in the Buckskin Mountains, near where the river cuts through the range, and he should judge it was over 300 acres in extent. There are petrified trees twenty inches in diameter. There is not a bush on this area that is not petrified ;'-the sagebrush and grass all being turned to stone. — American Exchange.

A letter sixteen years on its travels. The Napa {Cal) Reporter says " that a letter returned the other day to Mrs. J. E. Pond, of that city, beats anything in the line of longtravelling letters that ever came to our notice. The letter was written by Mrs. Pond's,husband sixteen years ago to a Mend in San Francisco. The missive failed to reach the party to whom it was addrsssed, but it seems, that in the course ol ft long time reached Washington, whence it was, only several days ago retarded to' this city." "