Why, then, is one entire area near these names designated by the National Park Service as a forbidden zone? No hikes are allowed without a permit in the many caves found there, and no permits are granted.

"Technically, all the caves in the Canyon are dangerous and are thus restricted, off-limits," I was told by Janet Balsam, chief of cultural resources at the park.

How many caves exist?

Mysteriously, no inventory has ever been created -- at least not one for the general public.

Why?

A Hopi Indian legend provides another clue. According to the Hopis' oral history, passed on to me by some elders, a young man, eons ago, half-Hopi and half-Anglo, wandered down a secret trail into the Grand Canyon.

Entering a colossal cave, he told of seeing urns made of copper and gold and a stone idol sitting cross-legged and cradling a lily in each hand. The walls were carved and etched with the faces and bodies of short people, some wearing helmets; some were nude, some partly dressed.

Is that cave and its contents merely a fanciful tall tale? Or could it be that, many thousands of years ago, the Grand Canyon did have visitors from Egypt and Asia?

Is it possible that the standard textbook story, that humans first settled the Southwest by pouring down from Alaska about 12,000 years ago, is the truly fanciful tall tale?

Rumors flew in the 1990s that a major discovery at the Grand Canyon had been covered up. Much to the dismay of park officials, nosy reporters, television crews and foreign tourists kept asking about an immense hand-hewn cave filled with artifacts and riches from Egypt and Asia.

They'd heard that many of the walls were engraved with hieroglyphics of the prehistoric people of North America, revealing who they were and from whence they had come.

Try though they have, park officials have had little luck burying the story of a certain Smithsonian expedition in 1909 allegedly led by G.E. Kinkaid and Professor S.A. Jordan. What those explorers claimed to have discovered was a great underground citadel featuring many passageways like the spokes of a wheel, some as long as football fields.

Walking through the pas-sageways, they came upon ancient weapons of war, sharp-edge copper instruments and hundreds of mummies stacked a dozen high.

If their discovery struck the editors of the Arizona Gazette as the wildest fancy of a fictionist, it didn't prevent them from running a detailed account on April 5, 1909. A subsequent account, with all the same details, was included in Joseph Miller's book, "Arizona Cavalcade," in 1962.

In that newspaper interview back in 1909, Kinkaid and Jordan told of finding tiers of mummies in the cavern, each occupying a separate rock-hewn shelf. At the head of each, they found copper cups and pieces of broken swords.

After examining some of the mummies, they determined them all to be male, leading them to conclude that the room they were in may have been a warriors' burial site. In another room, perhaps the main dining hall, they found urns and water vessels marked with fine designs, signifying to them "a latter stage of civilization."

In the 1909 Gazette interview, Kinkaid told the editors that, when they arrived in Yuma after the discovery, he'd shipped a number of relics to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., for evaluation. Kinkaid reported that two theories existed about the origin of the Grand Canyon mummies.