The Snakes allotted them a place
to build in the valley on the east side of the mesa, and about two miles
north from the gap. A ridge of rocky knolls and sand dunes lies at the
foot of the mesa here, and close to the main cliff is a spring. There
are two prominent knolls about 400 yards apart and the summits of these
are covered with traces of house walls; also portions of walls can be
discerned on all the intervening hummocks. The place is known as
Siky?tki, the yellow-house, from the color of the sandstone of which the
houses were built. These and other fragmentary bits have walls not over
a foot thick, built of small stones dressed by rubbing, and all laid in
mud; the inside of the walls also show a smooth coating of mud plaster.
The dimensions of the rooms are very small, the largest measuring 9?
feet long, by 4? feet wide. It is improbable that any of these
structures were over two stories high, and many of them were built in
excavated places around the rocky summits of the knolls. In these
instances no rear wall was built; the partition walls, radiating at
irregular angles, abut against the rock itself. Still, the great numbers
of these houses, small as they were, must have been far more than the
Fire-people could have required, for the oval house which they abandoned
measures not more than a hundred feet by fifty. Probably other incoming
gentes, of whom no story has been preserved, had also the ill fate to
build there, for the Walpi people afterward slew all its inhabitants.
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