Cather's accomplished 1925 novel includes a story-within-a-story of explorer Tom Outland, a character modeled after Richard Wetherill, the rancher who brought the Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde (called Blue Mesa in the novel) to the world's attention. She writes: "I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was as still as a sculpture…looking down into the canyon with the calmness of eternity…I knew at once that I had come upon the city of some extinct civilization, hidden away in this inaccessible mesa for centuries."  (SWU258, $15.00)