I don't suppose "lost" is quite the proper term to describe what I mean. But if you've ever stood at the edge of Cliff Palace in Mesa Verde or among the fallen stone columns in Olympia in Greece, you'd know.

Once there were people where there are now are none. Only ruins, strange ruins, unlike much of anything we have around us, remain. Maybe it's because they're so unlike anything else we know that we find them attractive.

Climb the hillside at Delphi—even though millions of other people already have been there before you—and you suddenly have a glimpse of a distant, lost civilization; one which flourished at the beginning of recorded history.

Or visit Tulum or some other Mayan city.

There's nothing like a ruin to start the imagination ticking away.

I first got hooked on ruins when we toured the many to be found in the Southwestern United States, places like Mesa Verde or Aztec or Chaco Canyon. Most of these ruins have been "restored," it's true, reconstituted by the Park Service from the bricks and stones left by the cliff dwellers, but they are haunting, nevertheless.

It's eerie to walk through their silent, often roofless rooms and to look down on the empty canyon below. It's easy to speculate about the peoples who once lived there and who daily descended to the valley to tend their crops.

Somehow it seems they must have lived an easier, simpler life—even though that's probably not true.

It would help if we knew more about them. But we don't. The Anasazi—the "ancient ones"—as the Navajos called them, haven't given us much to go on.

They had no written language and so they left us no records except the ruins. Like the Incas of Peru, much of who and what they were has to be inferred. We'll never be able to know much more about them and that only adds to their mysteriousness.

They came and the went, but they probably didn't go very far. Most archeologists speculate that the Pueblo Indians of Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado are their descendants. Like all desert peoples, they worried a lot about when the next rain was coming. It colored their religious beliefs. But they never resorted to the terrible sacrifices of the Aztecs to the south in Mexico in an attempt to get water from the gods. They were essentially a gentle, peaceful people.

Nor does anyone know for sure why they took refuge in the area's giant cliff caves. Archeologists guess it was because of invaders from the north—the people that eventually came to be known as the Navajos perhaps—but no one knows for sure.

All that's left to tempt us are places like White House Ruin in Canyon de Chelly, a small series of white buildings hanging on the edge of a small cave in the huge sheer buff rock of the canyon wall, accessible only by descending to the canyon floor and wading a stream. The ruin gleams like a white monument, as if made of marble, but, of course, it's not, it's just its plaster that makes it seem that way.

Looking at it, inevitably you try to imagine what it must have been like to have lived in the ruin. At first, you might think it would have been lonely, but there are other small ruins scattered up and down the canyon walls. Some are smaller, a few are bigger. What we don't know is how long people lived here or how long it took them to drag the stones and clay up from the stream to make the white buildings. Nor why they left this idyllic place for somewhere else.

Certainly it seems as if it must have been a safe and ideal haven from the world, although archeologists again dispute this. They say the Anasazi suffered from arthritis—heat was hard to come by in the winter and on chilly summer nights—and food was always a problem. Even as the nearby Hopi do today, each kernel of corn had to have its own small individual hole and had to be watered constantly to make it grow. Life wasn't easy.

It may not even have been tranquil, although it's difficult standing there and looking at White House Ruin to think anything else. Somehow of all of the Anasazi refuges, it seems the one most likely to be a kind of Garden of Eden.

Keet Seel, farther to the north and hard to get to, is a cave and obviously was undertaken by a frightened people.

Chaco Canyon and Pueblo Bonita are huge and probably the closest that native peoples got to urban civilization before the coming of Europeans.

White House Ruin is something else. Visiting it is like stepping into a tranquil stream, cool, restful and reassuring. Maybe that's what I sense when I see ruins. Or maybe it is the message that everything someday, somehow passes and some day ages and ages hence some one will look on where we lived and wonder who we were and what happened to us.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to Almaden Resident.