The Houses in the Wall

On the third morning Polly saw something in the cliff that was not cliff. High above the canyon floor, tucked into a great curved hollow in the rock, stood small square rooms with straight walls and dark doorways. They had been built into the wall the way a swallow builds under an overhang, sheltered from the rain above and out of reach below.

A rock squirrel sitting up on a warm slab told her what she was looking at. Ancestral Puebloan families raised those rooms out of stone and mud many hundreds of years ago, he said, choosing the hollow because it stayed dry, because it was hard to reach, and because it was warm in winter when the low sun could reach inside. One of the rooms is plastered pale, which is why people now call the whole place the White House.

Polly asked whether anyone had lived here before those builders. The squirrel laughed at her. This canyon has never really been empty, he said. Farmers, weavers, herders and travellers have followed this wash for more than four thousand years, one after another after another, and the Diné families who farm the floor today are simply the ones who are here now.

Below her a single narrow path came down off the rim in long switchbacks, dropping about six hundred feet to the sand. It is the only trail a visitor may walk into this canyon alone. Polly, who could have flown it in about twenty seconds, sat still on her ledge instead and watched the shadow of the hollow slide slowly across the old rooms.