Chaco Canyon by Christopher Dow Tucked in the broad, dry valley of Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, a civilization flourished for centuries. Its architects built their structures to last, with intricate and refined stone walls that both sheltered and aligned along mystic currents dictated by the paths of the sun and moon across the greater desert of stars. Though we do not know who these people were or why they built these buildings as they did, the monuments show that their builders thought and planned for some future. But what was it they thought? For what future did they plan? We probably will never know, but we do know some of the sounds they made. There were the cry of the infant and the wheeze of infirmity, the howl of triumph and the scream of pain, the moan of the lover and the sigh of loneliness, the babble of anticipation and the hush of excitement. Then, suddenly, it was over. The people of Chaco Canyon, it seems, just vanished, leaving only their stone buildings littering the landscape like the exposed skeletons of unknown creatures huge enough to have shaken the earth but fragile enough to have passed forever. And though they are decaying imperceptibly beneath the sandy fingers of the desert winds, many of those buildings stand strong even after a millennium of neglect. But there is something about them that is more durable than the adamancy of their stone. It is their strangeness. It speaks in a voice too hushed to comprehend about the mysteries of the culture that erected these complexes—a strangeness that has transcended the culture. Even in the bright sunlight, the buildings are dark, brooding, and somber, and the meticulously ordered walls hide mazes of passageways and rooms that seem as much like prison cells as habitat—passages and rooms where even the lost find no answers. Where are those who lived here—the people who rose from nowhere to create this maze that yet puzzles before returning to whence they came? Perhaps their remnants spread outward to build in progressive declension of space and time the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and the adobe structures of the Southwest. But if the people themselves have gone, their spirit remains. I have seen it in the nearby dark, sheer, barren rock hills that rise like eidetic shoals from dusty seas of desert’s forgetfulness. Etched in those rocks is a multitude of faces jumbled and often weird and haunted. Nature alone could not have created this massive anthropomorphic monument. The winds and cutting sands that carved it could only have been channeled by the ghosts of the same architects whose forgotten exodus left arcane ruins lying lifeless and alone in their broad, dry valley.