Cueva de la Olla, the main attraction, has a 20-foot entrance. There are slits, or vegas, in the smooth, gray-white surface, one of which was fashioned as an escape route through the rock by an American who fell in. The caverns are deep, dark and extensive, ruins of living quarters of the Mogollan culture of 950-1060. The site is the beginning of a series of separate caves in the same scale that stretch for miles along the rocky cliffs. Scattered in each are potsherds and open metates, ball-shaped stones used as weapons, and knifelike implements.
Visitors become human moles, taken with the suspension of time in the imagination.
Maria Ahumada of Tucson sinks down and is gone, then emerges on the other side of a cliff, exiting a small hole. You can climb all over. Archaeological adventures, however, cannot match the splendid, timeless scene from ridge top - the golden fields of grain and buckbrush, the gleaming river dividing them over the high cliffs with their impressionable forms and impossible cuts, canyons and gashes. It's a pause to take in what nature can best do - still the soul.