is the traditional attitude of the Englishman. "Too much of school makes Jack a dull boy," says he, and takes his boy away. In this I believe the Englishman is largely wrong. The dull, ignorant part of our population is far larger than it ought to be, and constitutes a national danger.
How far education in America is ahead of education in England may be judged by the size of the reading public. Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria has five readers in America for every one in England. A similar ratio existed for Maynard Keynes' Economic Consequences of the Peace Treaty and for Wells' Outline of History.
There is, therefore, an educated class far in excess of the upper forty thousand. There may be a whole million of well-read people. And the number progresses with the children who swarm through new big schools and universities.
8
Where is it all going? Is it drifting southward as I am, to Mexico, to Empire? Will it stay where it is and wax more illustrious? "Tell me where you have come from and I will tell you where you are going," saith the Cynic. "An evil crow, an evil egg." America as a nation was born in the throes of the War of North and South. Or it rose out of Washingtonian independence and Jeffersonian idealism. Or it arose from the Puritanism of the Pilgrim Fathers, or from the adventure spirit of the gentlemen of Virginia. From such origins one could chart some kind of destiny. But not with surety. One must go further back to the spirit of Elizabethan sailors, to Drake, and a thousand others. Latin America derives from the Conquistadores of Spain, but Anglo-Saxon America derives as surely from the English conquerors. America was Imperial before she was Democratic, and English before she was American. But then again the English, or at least the Saxons, were a sturdy, independent race, intolerant of bondage, urgent for their civic rights, always proud of freedom. If there is one thing that is with difficulty soluble in Anglo-Saxondom, it is character. It is by virtue of character that England has been a ruler of peoples, and possibly again it is character as much as business and excessive wealth and a leisured class that will lead America along her road of destiny. It is still in the air as to which road that will be—the way of Roosevelt or the way of Lincoln.
CHAPTER XVII ACROSS AMERICA NORTH TO SOUTH
Ewart was much surprised by the politeness of Chicago. If he made a mistake in New York, such as to bring his lighted cigarette into a car of the overhead railway, he met with such rebukes as Put that cigarette out! Put-it-OUT! But as the porter put our bags into the cab at Chicago he cried out to us: "Good luck, boys!" and gave us a cheery salute. Perhaps we overtipped him. And when we got to Santa Fe a salesman in a shop selling Ewart a shirt called him "brother"—"This pattern, brother, is what you want." I explained to my friend that the lower orders in New York were Lithuanians and the like, who had only just learned enough English to be impolite in it. He must not judge the manners of America by them.
We spent a Chicago morning in Marshall Field's and "The Fair," trying to buy a pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles and brown leather facings, something Ewart had seen on the boat and fancied. The foreman of the floor walkers of the huge department store examined his chart, saw at a glance which salesmen were occupied and which were waiting, and assigned us to one who was straightway called. That young man proceeded to try and sell to us, not what Ewart wanted, but what he had got; brought out box after box of shoes, and even persuaded him to try on a pair of shoes of an entirely different style. "But what I mean is a sort of a tennis shoe with leather toe-caps. You know what I mean," said Ewart. "You want Oxfords," decided the salesman, and passed him on to another department. Thence we were transferred to a subdivision of the Athletic department, and then got back to "Shoes." Here another salesman proceeded to show us all that we had seen before, assuring us, however, that he had just what we wanted.
After that we spent an hour in that crowded chaotic emporium called "The Fair" where the procedure was different. A very busy, preoccupied salesman, tending six or seven anxious bargain-hunting Chicagoans, assured us he had just the thing, got Ewart with his boots off, gave him a pair of white tennis shoes, "just to get his size," and left him stranded for a full quarter of an hour—whilst as it seemed all Chicago swirled past, gossiping, buying, clamoring, jostling, and in the midst of this great shop crowds of children went up and down a moving staircase for fun.
I believe that both in Marshall Field's and "The Fair" shoes of the kind wanted were in stock, but the salesman's habit was to show just what he was put in charge of—he had become incapable of the mental process of imagining what a customer might describe as his need. In England a shopkeeper has to pay much more attention to individual wants. If he has not got a certain thing he will get it. Americans buy much more from what is spread before them than by choice and need.
However, without the shoes, we left "The Fair" for the less crowded streets, and had lunch in a restaurant on Dearborn. My friend had ordered roast beef. "The thing to have here is 'hot dog,'" said I.
"No, really? I say, I think I'll change that order. Have you, er, have you hot dog?"
"Sure," replied the waitress with alacrity, and she brought him back two large sausages, crisp and burst at one end.
"Some dawgs, I'll say," smiled the girl as she put them before him. He did not put them away coldly from him. He ate his dogs, and was amused. He was getting what they call "an angle on America."
"Not bad 'eats,'" said he with a twinkle. "I'll remember that. In Chicago I ate dog."
One can hardly see Chicago in two or three days. It is a more important place for studying America than is New York. For it is more characteristic. The lights of the capitals of Europe all shine in New York. It is a city of a hundred good-bys. But in Chicago one light burns and that is the light of America. It is a city of a hundred good mornings.
But Chicago so much depends on your knowing what it was. The visitor who sees it for the first time is still likely to pass an adverse judgment upon it—especially if he wanders in its streets at random. There is dirt and a humanity that looks like dirt, there is appalling carelessness and lack of joy in life, rust and refuse uncounted—but that is not all. Chicago is a city rising to strong self-consciousness, a city getting under control and improving steadily. It is no longer the city which Stead saw when he wrote, If Christ came to Chicago, nor is it the city described in Upton Sinclair's Jungle. It is many streets better. It has gone several blocks West. In Chicago people now talk of the "City Beautiful."
Chicago has been the anvil of fortune, and that merely, the smithy, the works, the place to which men went to make money, to lift themselves from a life of rough primitive toil to a life of clean clothes and ease. There they employed whom they could to help them, and incidentally helped their helpers often. It is true they exploited the foreign immigrant and that they did not help him much—because he was largely helpless. And they attracted great numbers of Negroes and exploited them and did not help them much. They left the immigrant and the colored man to live round about their factories amid waste ends of material. And when that labor itself wore out, it lay around also as waste-ends—waste-ends of humanity. Hence the vast aggregation of dirt and poverty in the city.
But the point of view has changed. The people of business are so rich that America has become intolerant of poverty. Like the Prince of Monaco, she is determined to abolish the poor. She will not admit new poor into her country, and those she has she is raising out of the slough. Every thing and every one is being cleaned up. Chicago is to become all middle class, and during the ten years since I saw it first it has made enormous strides in that direction.
Michigan Avenue and the Magnolia Walk, the long parklike water-front, were very gratifying to our eyes after the clamor and bang of State Street and Dearborn, where there are still many at the anvil of fortune. "In a hundred years," I hazarded, "the whole city may have become a park."
Kansas City, at which we stopped next, is of course far less problematical in aspect than Chicago. It is smaller. It grew up in a more prosperous era. It took advantage of all the new fixtures and technical appliances of a later stage. It is, therefore, cleaner and not so much littered with discarded material. The stock yards and tanning factories, however, charge the air heavily upon occasion with an odor which should surely be intolerable. No one could live for pleasure in a city of infected air. It must, therefore, be a city of business, money-making, and that only, for most people. Yet it is a fine city on the high bank of the Kansas River, overlooking rich farmland. It is the fringe of the West, and cowboys with their broad hats and sunburnt faces are not infrequent on its crowded streets. There is an air of expectancy, as if the gates of industrialism and bondage stood open and the American nation was free to pour out on to the prairies and the wild places of the Rockies.
It much astonished Ewart that whilst passing through the States of Kansas and Iowa we could not buy cigarettes. There no one smoked, and it appeared no one wanted to. Cigarette smoking was regarded as a vice and a shame.
"Betting has also been abolished, and so has immorality," observed a Kansan with a smile.
"Free speech also," said I. And I had him there, for America was then still excited by the arrest of William Allen White at Emporia, Kansas, for saying he was partly in favor of a railroad strike.
Intolerance cuts into vice, but sometimes takes a slice of virtue too, even in Kansas. I believe, however, that the Kansan is nearest to being an average normal American. He is the representative American.
South of Kansas the people are mostly Southerners; West of it they are certainly Western; North of it and East of it they are certainly Middle West. But Kansas itself is a New England seed in Middle Western soil.
"You are the people who have taken away our wine," say Easterners, reproachfully.
The Kansans smile.
"We are the people!" they say, and are not at all ashamed.
Ewart and I traveled across Kansas and its many farms, and the vague thought of Quivira crossed my mind. This was the country in which Coronado and his followers in 1541 gave up their quest of gold, being brought to Wichita by an Indian who wished to lead them to their doom. In this country, the Indian said, lay the Kingdom of Quivira, where the King and his princes wore golden armor. And he brought them to a camp of nomads near the great bend of the Arkansas River, and there was naught there but the invisible possibility of what is now Kansas. The enraged Spaniards, therefore, strangled the Indian and turned their faces southward once more toward Cibola and the deserts in New Spain.
But golden Quivira is golden to-day, golden with corn, and Kansas is the richest State in the Union; a State literally without poor, a State of empty prisons, without doss-houses, without out-door relief. Kansas of to-day wears golden armor against Fate and has proved the Indian to be right.
"Ho for Kansas, land that restores us!" as Lindsay cried. And then, farewell. The train on its iron tracks rolls onward, following its predecessor, followed inevitably by its successor, sootily, dustily, heavily, to the steeps of Colorado; out of the green country up to the gray and bare, up to the hills and broken cliffs, to the pasture lands and the cowboys. The pipe smokers of Colorado fill the black-leather section of the ordinary cars, the smoking section; in come horse-faced men who have lived with horses so much that their features have caught a reflection of horses' features, men with sun-dried complexions and bodies; not so witty as the people of the East, more humorous though, and full of a new kind of talk. All the linen collars have gone, and with them the comparative stiffness of business life. Not that there are not collars on the train. God forbid! There are Pullman cars lagging on to us somewhere, and respectability sitting perched on plush, as everywhere else. But in the smoking section of the ordinary car is the real life of the country.
Ewart would have liked to dismount at Trinidad, Colorado, and at Dodge City, but our tickets were nearly out of date. So we let ourselves be hoisted on to the New Mexican plateau with its wide stretches of sand dotted with dwarf pines, with its dried-up river channels, its mud heads of mountains and strange bluffs, its Mexicans and Indians. Next day we were at Santa Fe.
CHAPTER XVIII THE DANCE OF THE JEMEZ INDIANS
1
One of the poets at Santa Fe had decided to return East and finish a University course which he had broken by a year of freedom and poetry in New Mexico. So Wilfrid Ewart bought his horse, an Indian pony, white, small-footed, and wiry, and named as it were facetiously, "George." He proved too short for a man of six feet two, but except at starting, when he sometimes refused to budge for five minutes, he went as well as the other two horses, Billy and Buck. He proved to be branded with the mark of the Santo Domingo Indians, and there were many horses of his size and gait in their pueblo. Every time we met any of the Indians, however, they would ask suspiciously, "Where you get that horse?" George gave us some amusement, for he jumped sideways with all four feet at once when a car passed him, and though slow by habit he would upon occasion jump to an impulse that he was in a race with my impetuous Billy. The mile home from the post office we would sometimes find ourselves in a wild gallop, chased for moments by starved dogs who drove Billy to additional excitement.
We had a pleasant autumn at Santa Fe, pierced though it was by shafts of winter cold. The sun heat was great, but there was frost every night. Ewart had brought literary work, and he sat with his papers in a profuse sun bath; he became deeply sunburned, and the skin peeled from the back of his writing hand. But it was good for him. Arriving in indifferent health, it was remarkable how he improved.
It was unfortunate that winter came so rapidly. Though so far South we began to have weather much colder than that of New York—and the snow from the mountain summits crept lower. Snow swept down from the heights, driven by the wind into our valleys. There were several October days when the whole desert was clad in unnatural white. Then the sun came out and, like magic, uncovered the desert again, and the thirsty sand drank up what dissolved, and soon all was as before.
In a pleasant interlude between snowstorms in early November we set off for the Jemez Dance, the annual trading fair and fiesta of November 12. My wife and I were on Buckskin and Billy. As we took no pack-horse along with us we had all our impedimenta strapped on to our saddles. We had been told we should find no water or provisions on the way, and so we carried more than we needed to have done. Ewart had four pounds of ham tied to the pommel of his saddle as well as a waterproof and toilet case, and his saddle pockets behind him were stuffed.
I carried bags before and behind. And Buck also was much encumbered, though his rider was so much lighter. Buck made a bad start by falling into the Acequia Madre, the irrigation ditch, with fore feet in front of a wretched rustic bridge and hind legs hanging in air. In this posture I had to undo his girths and liberate him from his packs ere we could get him on to his feet. He started, therefore, in a melancholy and cautious mood, and we walked him a good deal of the way. Indeed, in the evening, convinced that he was suffering from sprain, I persuaded Mrs. Graham to ride Billy whilst I led Buck by the reins. In this way we reached La Cienega and put up at a Mexican farm where we were very happily regaled, though we had to go to bed at eight o'clock and all slept in the same room. Next morning Buckskin showed that he had no sprain. I had led the horses to water and had returned to set our coffee-pot on the Mexicans' kitchen fire, and I had left them barely ten minutes when the farmer's wife came in and said two of the horses had got out of the inclosure. They were Billy and Buck. Lightly clad as I was, I threw my saddle on George and bridled him and went off at once. For I knew that the two miscreants would make for home at a good pace. George proved his worth that morning. Chasing other horses was what he was made for. He went like the wind after these horses. In a mile we got them in view; they were trotting steadily together; in a mile and a half they stopped and turned to consider us, and Buck stopped the hesitation by breaking into a hearty canter joined by Billy. But we overhauled them, and George, without any guidance from me, turned them both. If only I had been a cowboy and could have hauled the rope which I held in my hand! Alas, I missed the chance, and all three horses settled down for a cross-country gallop. I reflected that we should thus gallop up the main street of Santa Fe and up the Canon Road and into our familiar yard at noon. It was a perplexing thought. I slowed down George, therefore, and noticed that Billy and Buck did the same. I hastened again, they hastened; slowed, they slowed. But at five miles from La Cienega my second opportunity came, and I took it. A deep arroyo was spanned by a bridge. It could be reached across country without my appearing to pursue the horses. At the bridge I dismounted and idled and appeared to be interested in the view whilst the two runaways approached. Both suddenly stopped and stared. Billy raised his head very high and kicked out friskily with his hind legs. Buck made a wily detour. But I showed not the least interest, so they began to graze here and there where a tuft of grass appeared. I thereupon made a cup of my hand as if it held corn, and approached Billy, calling him, keeping the hand out of the view of the inquisitive, greedy, but very crafty Buckskin. Billy, however, intoxicated by freedom and the morning air, cut a wild cantrip and fled. But Buck really thought I had corn, and when I approached him I got near enough to put a rope over his neck. Secured and tied to the bridge, he looked a repentant horse. It took another ten minutes to capture Billy, then I changed the saddle on to his back and started all three back to Cienega at a smart trot. Then of course I could reflect how pleasant an adventure it was, the best two hours of the day. It was a pity, however, that the horses should lose their freshness before the real riding of the morning commenced.
We all set off at once for Penya Blanca, on the Rio Grande. We had hoped to ford the river that day, but now hope of that was gone. Yet it was a very pleasant day's riding, following over sand and bowlders and running water the scores of zig-zags of stream which threatened a profound ravine. All was gray. Tumultuous piles of rock stared down at us as we clattered along—the horses lapped at the water and made deep hoof-marks in the wet sand. There were no birds, no flowers, no evergreens—no life but that of ourselves and the sunlight on the gray pebbles. Even the fire which we made of water-washed wood burned with invisible flames, and the steam did not show till the water raised the lid of our coffeepot and boiled over. We sat together in the early afternoon, quaffed coffee, and ate down our weight of provisions. We had even got hay for our horses at a farmhouse, and we eased their girths and fed them a little and watered them ere we resumed our way.
We reached Penya Blanca at night, led o'er the moor by flickering lights. We nearly went to the Indian village of Cochiti, as its lights on the other side of the Rio Grande beckoned much more certainly. But after traversing a mile of deep sand we turned our horses and made for other lights which we judged rightly must indicate the settlement of the Mexicans. Penya Blanca is a squatters' village, extensive and substantial, though none of the settlers there have adequate legal title to the land they hold as theirs. Their forefathers came there to obtain the protection of the Cochiti Indians from the raiding Navajos, and they stopped there and took to themselves a large fertile slice of the lands of the Indians.
It was not too easy to obtain shelter for the night—but Ewart was taken in at a house where there was to be a wedding next day, and nobody there except he slept a wink all night long. He had hot coffee and a substantial breakfast before dawn. We were not so lucky, but we had a mattress and a floor in a room of an empty house. The horses fared best of all, being put into a cosy corral with heaps of alfalfa and corn and a grand disarray of cornhusks. Next morning we had them saddled at dawn, and rode to the fording of the river as sunrise was breaking over the mountains.
That day was a glorious one; first through the brown-leaved woods of the river shore, then up over sandbanks and crags, through copse and boscage, ever higher, to wild rocky country and vast wastes where no man lived and no cattle of any kind found pasture. The morning sun was over-swept by snow clouds, the winds hurried over mountain sides in white capes of flurrying snow. Snow blew lustily into our faces and over our horses. We rode into fast-dropping curtains of thick snow and rode through them and out of them into radiant sunlight again. There joined us on the way many Indians clad in cotton shirts and breeches and with old scarlet and orange blankets swathed about their shoulders like capes. Their polished ebony hair hung in long, rough-tied plaits from their lightly turbaned heads. I say turbaned, but the turban was no more than a gayly colored kerchief tied like a bandage around their temples.
"How!" "How!" they cried in little yelps as they drew abreast of us.
"Hello!" we replied. "Going to Jemez Dance?"
"Si, si," they answered. "You going?"
Few spoke any English, but they were delighted to have us of their company, and we went with various parties for many miles. Once there were more than twelve of us all cantering together over the vague trail, and it was a pretty sight.
"Poco frio—a little cold," was a favorite remark of ours.
"Si, mucho frio," they replied. "Not a little but very cold!"
They stopped and lit five-minute bonfires of dried weeds, just to warm their hands and bodies. Round these blazes they fairly danced. In the twilight of the late afternoon among the snow patches, these bonfire dances were most eerie in appearance.
The Indians were so cold they made their horses go faster and faster to keep warm. But as ours were more heavily burdened we kept a more moderate pace and let the Indians go ahead. We made a big pot of coffee in the afternoon and that kept warm our toes otherwise chilled in the stirrups. The Indians, on in front, had been eating melons and throwing down chunks of rind. In this rind and mouthfuls of snow, Billy and Buck took enormous pleasure, simply guzzling over them. George, however, seemed to have toothache and turned his head away.
One of the Indians helped us greatly when we rode on. He was from San Felipe, and named Lorenzo. He turned out of the party he belonged to and watched us lest we should go astray. Possibly he saved us from a night wandering in the mountains. For when we had taken a wrong trail and gone some way upon it our attention was arrested by long persistent cries which we felt had references to us. And looking about, we saw the silhouette of Lorenzo on the top of a little mountain and saw that he was signaling us to come toward him.
This we did, and we found we had been going on a dangerous precipitous trail which in truth led no whither except to goat pastures and hideous abysses. Lorenzo went with us the rest of the way and we descended into the Jemez valley by a track that none but Mexican ponies would follow; down narrow gullies, along broken ledges, down sharp slides and drops. The whole country side dropped in tumultuous crags and steeps, shale slopes, cliffs, precipices—to the Jemez River. The last light of evening gleamed on us and we left our fate to Lorenzo and the horses to do with it what they would—an adventurous, and, as it seemed, a perilous, ride.
At nightfall, as the village church was ringing for vespers, we rode into the crowded pueblo and were four out of many who had come to the great dance and fiesta.
2
The Jemez Dance used to be one of the finest and most elaborate of the Indian dances, and the tribe, living more remotely, had kept itself more fresh and vivid and unspoiled than for instance the Tesuque Indians, the pets of the artists, who dance on the same day. But the growth of the great city of Albuquerque and the development of the high road to Jemez Springs have attracted the gaze of the white man in all its vulgar curiosity and ignorance. I do not speak of artists and poets, who are as reverent at a dance as the most pious at Mass, but of those who think of life as a colored supplement to a Sunday paper, a Chaplinade, a burlesque, something over which to be facetious.
"There's a bunch of dudes coming over from a dude ranch," said a cowboy, referring to a touring party from a fashionable resort.
"A speculator come here las' week from Albuquerque and booked up every spare room in the pueblo," said another. "But the road's nigh blocked with snow. Guess we sha'n't see any Albuquerque folk this year. Too much scared of being stranded. Once a party got snowed up here for a week."
"There's a man here I'd like to insult," said Ewart with a laugh. "He is Babbitt himself. I'd like to go up to him and say 'Mr. Babbitt, I believe,' with a courtly bow."
Babbitt was certainly there with his wife and kodak and furs and waiting automobile, but he was not duplicated. He stood out in relief against all the rest. For all the lesser Babbitts had been scared by the snow.
November the 12th, Spanish festival of St. Iago, festival of the war cry by which the country was conquered, Saint Iago a ellos,—Up and at them, St. James! was the great day at Jemez. It was a bleak Sunday morning and the stark, jagged hills, pedestals of rock, standing places which encompass the dark village were lit by radii of a flashing sunrise. Silhouetted up there stood solitary Indians, watching religiously, and they remained till night had fled and the living sanguine of the mountains was revealed. Down below, in the streets of the pueblo, you would think there were a hundred wild horses. For the visiting Indians, unable to find stabling, had turned their horses loose, and they ran about like dogs, hunting for provender, whinnying to one another, biting one another, kicking, scampering from yard to yard. Our three horses were set upon by droves which I sought to keep off whilst they ate.
Usually in the morning the Jemez Indians dance a horse dance—very fitting in such a place of horses—one Indian is made up as a horse, and he is accompanied by a drummer with a soot-colored face, and a naked mirth-maker. And these parade the mud-built town. But this year that dance was omitted.
Instead the traders and the Navajos chaffered over the price of blankets. Snowflakes fell indolently on to the gray streets, on to the horses' backs, on to the many hogs, on to the quaint mud domes of the bread ovens, the estufas, in front of the houses, but it settled most of all on the gorgeous handwoven blankets of the Navajos. Every year hundreds of Navajos ride in from their country, which lies between the Jemez River and the Grand Cañon, and bring a years' product in woven blankets, and there come to meet them here many Indians from Santo Domingo. For the Domingo Indians mine turquoise, and are clever craftsmen in silver. The Navajos want silver and turquoise ornaments; the Domingans want blankets. So a great barter takes place. Besides these, the white trader comes and buys in dozens and makes many profitable deals.
"Don't tell anybody," said Mrs. Babbitt. "I've brought these parrot feathers. Don't you think I might get a bracelet with them?"
And she did.
Meanwhile from a squatters' village came a meager crowd of Mexicans in black, and filled the seats of the little Indian church, and gave to the fiesta the appearance of a Christian festival. A priest also appeared and a Roman Mass was sung. A group of Mexican youths with guns waited to fire a volley in air at the elevation of the Host—but they were discouraged and took to random firing instead.
"I think we'd better give these fellows a wide berth," said Ewart, as he watched the way they were fooling with their rifles.
They were neither pious nor careful, for they continued taking shots at sparrows and crows while the figures of St. Iago and the emblems of the Church were carried past them in procession.
Curiously irrelevant seemed the diminutive, black-dressed procession, following a white-surpliced priest, a man with a lantern, a man with a Cross, and two men with figures of the Saint, a Mexican carrying a modern, machine-made St. James and an Indian carrying the original Indian-made image of wood. The Navajos, all between six and seven feet tall, swathed from head to ankles in voluminous, bright colored blankets, looked exceedingly morosely at the spectacle, only their dark, cavernous eyes staring from faces which they covered even to their noses with the flaps of their blankets. The wind blew, the dust rose, the snow came slanting down, and the black-robed Mexicans turned their faces away as they trudged. The Cross and the flickering lantern wavered in air as they went.
There met them, accidentally, the heralds of the dance, the ugliest and squattest of the Jemez Indians, their faces blackened out with soot, and bearing in their hands tiny, home-made drums which they beat with a will. The tom-tom was beaten by two of them, and a third, with widely dilated eyes and old, strained, carved-out face and flying hair, sang in pagan voice—Hoi hoi ho-ho, ha-ha-ha-ha. The Church went one way; they went another, without a salute, as if one were invisible to the other.
At noon the Presbyterian missionary made his annual visit and, with the Agent and the District Nurse and the aid of a harmonium, struck up "Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me." The Indians had marched out in their beauty; no ugliness now, no devil frightening, but a serene picture of physical loveliness. The Koshare, spirits of ancestors, mirth-makers, leaders of the dance, had been prohibited this year, their nakedness having been considered unseemly by the white onlookers. But the youth of the village were nearly naked, and nothing short of glory to their Creator.
The dance was like wind in the corn or fast-traveling shadows on the hills; it was like the dimpling of the waves where many waters meet together; it was like the arching of the necks, the waving of the manes of many horses on the prairie; it was like the trembling of morning light upon the mountains and the sea. The snowflakes emulated it but did not succeed. And all who watched seemed turned to stone, to perfect immobility, by the perfection of the movement that they saw. The hundreds of tall Navajos were like statues, and those on the roofs looking down on the wide, brown, sandy, open place of the dance—there were many on the roofs—looked like figures that had survived centuries and looked on unmoved hundreds of time, hundreds of years. They were completely and sharply silhouetted against the mountains and the sky.
The Jemez men were painted a dark yellow, and wore white moccasins threaded with silver bells. In their hands they carried gourds with peas in them which they rattled. 'Twixt their bare arms and an armlet they carried slips of green pine. They were crowned with leaves and feathers, they had turquoise necklaces on their smooth round necks. And their long, coal-black hair hung on their backs to the mount of their hips. The barefooted women wore green tablitas, like crowns, on their heads, and colored fajas about their waists. They had bracelets and rings, they held green branches in their hands. Their dance was a tremble, a departure from calm; the men's dance between them a prolonged ecstasy, a descending out of eternal movement into calm.
They surged up the village street, ever forward, ever more of them, more strung-out, more beautiful—accompanying at the side were dramatic groups in everyday attire, chanting, exhorting the unseen Powers, roaring together fantastic choruses of semimusical gibberish. And the drums beat inexorably, as if they were the voice of the gods, the control whom no one at any time had ever disobeyed.
You are changed to stone, yes, to the stone of the Stone Age. Babbitt has gone; there is only this that you see. Ah, no—for somewhere a church bell has been set a-ringing and a harmonium is playing a hymn; yes, there it is, in much rebellion and complaint—"Nearer, my God, to Thee!" Mr. Babbitt nonchalantly strides in among the dancers and distributes cigarettes which the dancers, being nearly naked, cannot put away. He will not be denied. He photographs the scene. He has a knowing look. The Indian Governor is angered, but what can he do? There is nothing the white man understands except force; neither manners, nor reason, nor what is sacred. So the will of the white man will prevail. The beautiful dancing will cease.
"I give it ten years," said the Forestry agent of the Government. "By that time they will all be citizens. It will be a Presbyterian village."
"Just like a village in the Highlands of Scotland," I hazarded.
The agent smiled. For he was a Highlander by extraction. The Scot, though sentimental at home about "the snowflake that softly reposes" on his native hills, about the heather, the kilt, the bagpipe, and the rest, is often the most unsentimental and prosaic fellow when in the presence of another nation's romance.
However, the Presbyterians have it not all their own way in Jemez. The Catholics claim it as their ground, sanctified by the blood of Franciscan martyrs. They are educating the children and making them, therefore, extremely naughty and ill-behaved during the dance. For they are taught to despise paganism. The pranks played by the children on their dancing fathers and mothers I should prefer not to mention in describing the beautiful dance. Yet they were there and were signs of the times.
3
The night after the dance there was a fight between the Navajos and the Apaches, two or three score of the latter having ridden in and begun strutting through the pueblo with their orange-colored scarves and big feathers in their dark sombreros. They and the Navajos were the fiercest of the Indians and used to ravage the whole country even down as far as Chihuahua in Old Mexico. And they are still warlike people, ready to start strife on a slight pretext. The Navajos are especially untamable.
The horses also this night got into trouble, their exasperation and hunger seeming to possess them. Juan Louis Pecos, the Indian who had charge of our three steeds, did the best he could, but that was not much. George and Buck were tied to a post. Billy had been put in hobbles and turned loose. But the Indian horses constantly invaded the yard of the house where we were staying, and the unhobbled ones drove Billy away from his feed. Juan, having taken part in the dance, was very late in bringing the alfalfa, and when he brought it it proved to be of a very thorny nature, reaped with abundant weeds from Indian fields. Just after nine at night we had an exciting half hour.
Billy, having been dispossessed, vented his rage on George, whom in any case he regarded as an interloper, and drove him round and round the post to which he was tied until the rope was wound tight. The little white pony looked as if he were going to strangle himself, and he was in a violent excitement, kicking out with his hind legs and straining with all his neck muscles. Buck, tied near him, craftily avoided all entanglements. But Billy, hobbled as he was, could not be restrained. Ewart untied Buck and he scampered off, and I cut George's rope, sawing it for several seconds, for it was a very stout fine line of an unbreakable kind. George meanwhile let out at all and sundry, and when cut loose dashed away with Billy after him.
Mrs. Graham happily recaptured Buckskin at the drinking trough—fortunately he had not grasped the geography of the large ramshackle yard, else he would no doubt forthwith have set off for home. Ewart and I chased the other two horses to the accompaniment of the clangor of Billy 's chain-hobbles. They got into the main street of the pueblo and Billy made such a pace, even hobbled, that we could not overtake them; he leapt like a hobbyhorse, he trotted in short rapid steps, and he certainly made the white pony go. George, however, doubled on us and Billy doubled across our tracks also. We cried to Apaches and Navajos to aid us, but they looked on gloomily from their blankets. Dogs rushed about and barked and gave chase, and we, with electric torches in our hands, strove to see the horses we were after. Billy was audible by the sound of his hobbles. But suddenly, to my horror, I saw his big shadowy body leap in air and heard a sickening thud. He seemed to have gone neck over crop. I could not surmise what had happened to him. There was, however, a chance to run down George in a corner of a waste field, and I ran to assist Ewart. George was recaptured. Then with torches we sought the form of Billy. He made not a sound now and might be dead.
I found him at last, lying stretched out as if he had breathed his last. But he was far from dead. Seeing me, he made a great effort to get up, but fell back helpless. Then I saw what had happened. He had caught the shoe of one of his hind legs in the chain which held his two fore legs, and a link was firmly embedded between the iron and the hoof. I felt much relieved, petted him, and then with a big stone in one hand and the electric light and his hind leg in the other I started the awkward job of knocking the bit of chain out of his hoof. Ewart held George and shed his light also on the scene. Indians came and peered at us out of the darkness, and the hubbub of dogs barking continued all over the village.
Billy was freed without further accident, and the three horses were tied up in separate places, and in a repentant mood they stood and watched till morning. They looked very miserable at dawn. For they had had no corn, and the other horses had stolen their hay, and they had had a series of frights in the night. I went with an old Indian on to the top of his roof, and we filled a sack with ripe corn on the cobs—some yellow, some scarlet, some almost blue, and we fed the horses personally, each of us his own, and that was a great comfort. Then we saddled up and rode on to the trading post of San Ysidro.
Here an enormous trade was being done by white traders buying up all manner of Indian wares and selling store goods in exchange. We took refuge in Miller's Trading Store and put our horses in charge of "Velvet Joe" who led them to happy quarters. Buck rolled on his back for a long time and then sat on the soft ground and looked around him like a contented dromedary. Velvet Joe came and told us the horse was ill. But he did not understand the joy of the escape from that exasperating pueblo and its wild horses. Billy and George, having contemplated Buckskin for a while, followed his example and took a good roll also.
Next day we rode to Zia on sand dunes over the Jemez River, in a fullness of sunshine. In the evening we made the pueblo of Santa Ana and slept in an Indian house, all on the floor of a mud-built room. An ex-governor was our host, a very gentle and indeed beautiful Indian. At dawn the day following we climbed the dark table mountain, having to lead our horses and coax them to mount the steep slopes of volcanic scoriæ and bowlders. Looking backward, we saw Santa Ana removed to obscurity and littleness far away on the yellow evenness of the river shore. We with our horses were exalted on black and dreadful cliffs. Cold winds sprang at us from the ravines. Persistent winds blew against us and athwart us. We achieved nevertheless the summit—and the summit was a new country, a wide, grassy plateau miles across, but without view except cloud and sky. Perhaps we were lucky, but we rode on to the faint sheep trail to San Felipe and came at last, after an hour or two of riding, to a plunging, rocky stairway leading downward, a nose-dive down to the Rio Grande River, and there, like a Moorish city, lay the beautiful yellow pueblo of San Felipe. The horses did not object to the steep descent; all three in single file we descended slowly and processionally, down to the village of our friend Lorenzo. And the first Indian we met there was he.
Lorenzo took us where we could get food, and happily put us on the way to Santo Domingo which at nightfall we reached. We still rode on to the Mexican stores and inn two or three miles nearer Santa Fe, and there, feeling pretty tired, we did justice to a hot supper of ham and eggs and coffee and potatoes and other good things.
The next day was the last day of our ride, and we experienced a violent snowstorm, climbing La Bajada Hill in an upflutter of snowflakes, and finding the moor above it deep in snow. A pitiless east wind drove a blizzard against us, caking our right-hand sides with ice and snow. The horses grew all white; "domes of silence" raised their hoofs, additional snow boots fixed on their hoofs. They stumbled repeatedly. Twenty miles in a raging blizzard was an ordeal for them as much as for us, but they knew they were nearing home and comfortable, happy quarters. "There's no Place Like Home" was written on the knowing features of Buck. And Billy, who was none the worse for his adventure with his hobbles, encouraged Buck onward as it seemed.
That night, when we had all changed our clothes and the horses were fed and housed and we sat and watched three-foot logs flaming from a broad hearth, we felt we had had an adventure—we had gone far, we had seen new life, we had lived intimately with our horses for a week, and it had been greatly worth while.
Cigarette smoke rose from our chairs in meditative rings.
CHAPTER XIX THE DANCE OF THE ZUNYI INDIANS
At the end of November I went to Cibola, which had been the goal, four hundred years ago, of Coronado and his companions. I had hoped to ride over the ground of Cortes' conquest of Mexico first and then follow the adventures of Coronado and his companions who followed the golden vision of Cibola northward. Thus I should have kept to the historical sequence—Columbus and the Indies, 1492, Balboa and the Pacific, 1513, Cortes and Montezuma, 1521, Coronado, 1541. But life and death break up elaborate plans. Since Wilfrid Ewart had joined us in New Mexico, we decided to follow Coronado first and seek, as he did, the far famed seven cities. We read the quaint Spanish narrative of Coronado's journey and we set off, and it was at the time of the wonderful Shaleco Dance.
A colored gentleman in 1540 was greatly responsible for the legend of the Seven Cities, though he paid for it with his life. But it may be that the Friars Marcos of Nice and Antonio of Santa Maria, who accompanied him, were more credulous. The black man is generally known as Stephen the Moor. All set off together but the friars, not liking the smell of their companion's skin, bade him go ahead and they would follow at a convenient distance. Stephen the Moor was not loath, and being of an adventurous spirit he improved his opportunity, made love to Indian girls as he went along and filled his bags with their turquoise. The friars lagged behind and spent so much time in prayer and hesitation that Stephen the Moor got to be two hundred and forty miles ahead of them. When he arrived at Cibola they were only at Chichilticalli.
The Indians of Cibola would not believe the blackamoor when he said he represented a white race and had a great white emperor. His complexion belied it. The Indians concluded it would be safer to kill him. They had never seen a black man before and were much perplexed. They did not believe Stephen the Moor's story; perhaps they could not understand it. But they evidently thought it would be safer to kill him than to let him go back to his tribe. So Stephen the Moor was choked, and the first discoverer of Cibola perished;—his harem and the bags of turquoise were scattered. When the friars, toiling through the desert, heard of it they were stricken with fear and gave away to the news bearers all that they had—except their vestments. They turned about precipitately and fled incontinently back to Court, bringing the tale of a mighty race of Indians and another Montezuma, of riches incredible and a sway mightier than the empire of the Aztecs. Strangely enough, the friars believed their own story.
Straightway an expedition was fitted out, of braggadocios and gallants, of noble desperadoes and desperate nobles—in short, of the best blood in all New Spain. Coronado took the head, and would not Coronado outdo the deeds of the great Cortes himself? The almost fabulous wealth and splendor of Mexico had prepared the naturally credulous minds of the Spaniards for even the most fantastic things. So it did not prove difficult to man and equip an army to conquer Cibola. The vanguard was all of "heroes," the rear was an ever-swelling army of camp followers.
They rode five hundred leagues; the honored friars, no longer timid, accompanying. Their plump horses grew thin and weak, and the riders walked beside them and shouldered their own empty treasure sacks, hoping ever to feed and fill in the rich country beyond. But every day was one of cactus and wild dusty waste. The hands of the prickly pears were dusty—water was the rarest things in the earth. But what did it matter? The rich rare Cibola was near.
Scores of times were the friars called upon to retell their story. And they abated no jot of the splendors. They sustained the courage of the army to cross one of the most dreadful wildernesses in the New World. And the Spaniards thought themselves well on the way to India or the fabulous approaches to Tibet and Turkestan.
When one reflects that this adventurous army, like that of Cortes, asked nothing else but gold, real fortune, one can understand the extent of their disillusion and chagrin. From a historical and geographical view it was a most valuable and interesting expedition. But what did that matter to them? When they found Cibola and realized that it had no treasure they journeyed another thousand miles in quest of it, the even more fantastic "Kingdom of Quivira" and people of a weaker race than Spaniards would have vanished away and disappeared in the deserts, like the streams of the Rockies.
There was a Cibola, there is a Cibola, and Cibola will be. It is one of the most undisturbed spots in the world. The Zunyi Indians who inhabited the Seven Cities and who still live among the ruins of them, hold a remarkable belief. They are geoplanarians and have always considered the earth to be flat, and that at the extremities there is danger of falling off. Our London, New York, Tokio, San Francisco, Capetown, Melbourne, and the rest, they would reckon highly dangerous—and quite truly. Ages ago, it is said, the guardian Spirit led the Zunyi tribe to the safest spot, that is, to the very center of the earth, the point furthest away from the edge. The sacred rock, Hepatinah, in the Zunyi land, to-day as then, marks the center. There were a few thousand Indians in those cities when the Spaniards came and there are a few thousand still. They live in houses of dried mud and of quarried stone—they are heavily and beautifully adorned with turquoise and silver. They are gentle and mild in character but very firm of will, people of changeless purpose, and they have successfully withstood soldiers, missionaries, pioneers, commercial travelers and tourists for four hundred years. They are worshipers of Nature gods and have a religion which is all playfulness, dance, and drama, very beautiful in its expression and evidently more real to them than the faith of the missionaries.
I set out for Cibola on foot; Wilfrid Ewart went by car. My starting point was the Penitente village of San Rafael in New Mexico. Nearly all the inhabitants there practice self-flagellation in Lent and are Spanish-speaking. Not that their forefathers were followers of Coronado. The upper Rio Grande country was settled at a much later date, and then very sparsely and by people whose Catholicism was not entirely orthodox. The Penitentes are a "peculiar people," said by some to be an attempt to realize the Third Order of St. Francis, and quite possible having their causa prima in the zeal of the Franciscans. Be that as it may, San Rafael is a wide-spread, untidy and inhospitable settlement on a plain covered otherwise with innumerable volcanic cinders. The cactus alone of all the vegetable world seems at home among the gnarled and crusted and broken rocks and the blue-black cakes and slabs of volcanic asphalt. There are lines of tumbledown adobe houses down below, and three moradas or Penitente chapels on the hills above.
Among the inhabitants is a Jewish storekeeper, Solomon Bibo, once Governor of the Indian pueblo of Acoma, near by, and lord of the "Enchanted Mesa." "Mesa," by the way, is our old friend "mensa," a table, with the "n" left out, and means in Spanish a tableland. As the main characteristic of the country is the dark, sharp-edged tableland, we may have frequently to refer to "mesas."
As a young man, Solomon Bibo came into these parts and sold goods by the wayside, sold them to the Indians, started a trading post, married an Indian girl, won his way to the hearts and councils of the Acoma Indians, who, by the way, four hundred years before, from the height of their mesa, fiercely withstood Coronado. And Solomon who must have learned their language, and danced their dances, entered the tribe and was elected Governor.
That partly answers the question why Jews are not seen to go to Aberdeen. Why should they, when they can go to Acoma and become, as it were, princes?
However, Sol Bibo had had his day at the pueblo and was now leading storekeeper in San Rafael among these less congenial though not less profitable Penitente Spaniards.
Epiphany brought me my horse and we set off. To Cibola from San Rafael is somewhat over eighty miles, through the Zunyi mountains and the Mormon village of Ramah, getting on to what used to be a great but desolate highway in Spanish times from the South to the North.
The trail climbed upward from the warmer lower levels of the lava beds and wound into the mazes of great rock débris, up to banks of unmelted snow and long snow trails where spruce and pinyon blurted from the rocks. We reached wide, untrammeled fields of snow and entered a snowstorm which enveloped us in white veils. Epiphany took a blanket from under his horse and tied it about his shoulders, and I put on my gloves and turned up my collar. We cantered the horses through the snow, even galloped. For the snow made the Spaniard uneasy, and he urged speed. His horse Diamond did not look as if he would last out, but his master had no doubts, and though he plunged and stumbled and got into holes Epiphany merely swore at him, pulled him up, and urged him on the faster.
When the snowstorm lifted Epiphany seemed to be more at ease, but he had broken one of his stirrups and that forced him to a steady trot. We rode across to a deserted cabin, and he sought some wire to mend the stirrup whilst I opened a can of tongue and cut up a rough lunch. Epiphany then admitted he had never been to Ramah before in his life, though he had heard that it was Mormon and you could have more than one wife. This tickled his mind a good deal and he said: "I'll write to my girl when we get there to come and be my first wife." And while he spoke he arduously wound alfalfa wire about the wooden foot-cage of his stirrup.
"We must go much faster now," he cried. For the Mexican who is so slow over everything else is very impatient on horseback. Epiphany cantered uphill or downhill and over stones and holes in a mad style, not merely for a hundred yards or so but over leagues.
We emerged on to a magnificent, snow-covered plateau and plunged gayly across it, not guessing that there were twenty miles of it and that it was not to be conquered in an hour. Over all the white prairie the tops of withered stems poked through the snow, and you knew the trail by the absence of the stems and a shadow, a vague indentation. Rosy mesas called to the woods and to us from a far horizon, and slowly as we rode there came into view what looked like a great white castle or cathedral fully ten miles away but glittering in late sunlight. I felt I could not be mistaken; this must be the famous "Mesa Escrita" or Inscription Rock, as the Americans call it, whereon Spanish explorers and travelers have written their names even from the time of Onate.
As it stands hard by the road to Ramah we made for it and rode for nearly two hours toward it before it seemed to grow near us. But by then the snow clouds had returned. Eager airs swept the plateau with earfuls of snow and wisps of blown drift. Evening dusk was closing rapidly in, and it looked as if we should be out in the storm all night when we espied a Mexican rancher coming towards us on his horse. This was Caromillo, returning from Ramah to his cabin with a sack of flour, and he advised us to spend the night with him.
So we rode back to a tiny adobe hut whose door was bolted from within. And the little old man let himself in at a window and then undid the bolt. It was like an icehouse inside, but we readily unsaddled our horses and led them into the corral and then lit a fire in the hut and put on pots to boil. It then rapidly grew hot, and we stretched ourselves on the clay floor, drank coffee, munched bread and cheese and fried salmon from a tin.
Night had come down outside and hid the great rock which we were so near, and when I went out to look at the horses a three-ways blowing snow tempest made whirls of snow dust in the air. Curiously enough, the moon was shining behind the storm and lit up the snow-swept little cabin and barn with a dim turnip-lantern light.
There was not much comfort in Caromillo's house; we slept on the clay floor, but even it could impart a feeling of home in the midst of such a storm. But the Mexicans were strange men to be quartered with. Epiphany, who had torn his shirt riding through the thorns, took that garment off with some idea of mending it, and his bare back was all scarred with the marks of his Penitente creed. Flippant and cynical in his conversation, light-hearted certainly, and yet he was bound in the ascetic traditions and gloomy piety of his people. I would not ask him about his religion, yet I wondered if he ever would be "crucified" and hang on a Penitente cross till he fainted, as so many of them do.
Next morning there was a silver dawn. The Mesa Escrita was all encrusted and hanging with snow. It had taken on an aspect of the fantastic and hardly belonged to this world. And as we rode towards it, because of the mists it grew further away. I saw it as it were removed into the past, with wanderers remaining there from a bygone age. I would have liked to write my name also on the great rock—I came and I passed. But being on our horses we did not stay. We left our footprints in the snow. The snow was deep; the silence was utter. Even our horses made not the slightest sound as they padded over the trackless waste of snow. Snow-veils hurried across the mesas—snow descended upon us and hid all from view. Thus it was that on Thanksgiving morning we got lost and neither of us could say which was the way.
We rode up to the stone giants, a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet high standing at the entrance to the Cañon de los Gigantos, and they looked down at us with their snow-crowned heads. We rode to ranch houses only to find them empty of human beings as their byres were devoid of cattle. Epiphany saw a dark figure in the snow and spurred hard after it and I followed, and we came up with a fleeing Indian squaw and a dog, and she would say nothing but plunged abruptly into the bush. When we found her again it was in a hogan, a shelter only one third covered from the snow. There was a fire burning, and the squaw sat herself down in front of it and would answer naught, either to Spanish or to English questions. Her little children stared at us, and her dogs sat on their haunches about the fire.
We got nothing from her. But, to cut a story short, we went after that by compass and map and got to Voigt's ranch, and being Thanksgiving Day there was a grand spread of turkey and cranberry sauce and many preserves, and very pretty girls to look at and intelligent people to talk to. The storm and the wilderness had been suddenly changed for civilization. I went that night to a Mormon wedding dance at Ramah.
Mr. Voigt is the official curator of Inscription Rock and has done a great deal to preserve the remarkable surface which is scrawled not only with the names of famous Spaniards but with the pictographs and hieroglyphics of the Cave dwellers. It has certainly been a great cave-dwelling region at one time. Voigt took me behind his ranch house to a well-preserved village of cave dwellings. He found when he bought the property he had bought this prehistoric village also. Natural caves had been added to by the hollowing out of the rock, and the houses partitioned off and the wind walled off with piled rocks and mud. The theory is that the people of Cibola, to defend themselves from the Apaches, Comanches, and Navajos, took to caves at one time. But of course theories innumerable could be brought forward. No one has learned to read the hieroglyphics.
One especially good service Mr. Voigt has performed as curator of the Rock, and that is, to have erased the names of a score or so of modern visitors who with a nonchalance which is almost sublime had written their names down with those of the Conquistadores; the Winkelsteins of Chicago, the Jones's of Jonesville.
This Mesa Escrita is, however, little visited. For it is thirty or forty miles from Cibola or Zunyi, and those who go to the Indian pueblo seldom go further. It is in part of the most remote country of America—as the Zunyis themselves think, it is the place furthest from the edge. Hence, I suppose, the Mormon settlement of Ramah. For the Mormons, being a persecuted sect, have ever sought out places where they were not likely to be disturbed.
Ramah is an American village, not Mexican or Indian in type, but a bit of North America, all little wooden houses and neatly fenced yards. We drove to the wedding dance and I talked to the Bishop and the elders and found a rather sad lot of Mormons where, after all, far from polygamy being practiced, there were not enough girls to go round. The eligible brides seemed mostly pale and thin. With what devotion the Mormon young men clasped Betty and Katharine who, unlike the Mormon girls, were well-formed, open-air girls full of life and desire.
Another day passed and we drove to Zunyi. It was the last stage. There was deep snow and mist over it with vague sunset lights wandering in the mist. Up on the mesas I saw the first two of the cities of Cibola—in the ruins in which Coronado left them. And there in the mist I saw a third of the cities, but greater and grander, with towers and domes, and unlike anything Indians ever built. Golden and rose lights of sunset tinted the shadowy outline. I said to Voigt and his nieces—"Look! Cibola!" but even as I did so it had gone—melted into the general configuration of the Mesas of Zunyi. It was Coronado's mirage seen again—and his disillusionment.
It was dark when we arrived at the real Cibola, the strange and unwonted city which the Spaniards found, the home far from the haunts of other men, of the wonderful Zunyi tribe with their coal-black hair, bright-colored little turbans, turquoise earrings, bead necklaces and silver rings and bracelets and brooches and ceintures, with their elaborate dances and religious rituals, and a Nature worship against which Catholicism has never been able to make way.
When we entered the first large house we saw that the Shaleco Birds had already come down from the mountains, and in each of the Shaleco houses prayers were being chanted by the Indians. Zunyi's halls were all alight with large lamps and hung with every kind of glittering wampum. There were great white beams and white walls decorated with dados of printed cotton, there were ropes along the wall and there hung silver belts and serapes—waist swathes—deerskins, shawls, beautiful blankets, necklaces. There were bowls of the sacred meal upon the floor, and a long line of sprinkled meal led up to what seemed to be an altar—the Shaleco altar. In front of that stood motionless the framework and vest of the Shaleco Bird, as it was being consecrated, and Indians chanted unendingly prayers and incantations. Along the walls stood visiting Indians, chiefly Navajos, wrapped in their resplendent blankets, waiting and silent.
Up till midnight, however, the chief activity seemed to be in the kitchens where a great feast was being prepared. The kitchens were large enough for stacks of joints of meat to be piled up—and along the whole length of the walls flamed log-fires with a dozen high old earthenware pots simmering upon them. The odor of the joints was almost overpowering, but it was pleasantly blended with the smoke which went up the vast vent of the hollow wall. Old squaws with bent backs tended pots and flames and they wore long bright kerchiefs on their heads and down their backs. Certainly they never knew how cold it was outside.
We went to "Pablito" and "Emily," fanciful names of an Indian and his wife. Their true names they will seldom divulge. They gave us a room and blankets—in case we could snatch a few hours of sleep now and then. Pablito's house was a strange hive of activity. It had a long corridor which led to a bake-house, and through our room and along this corridor went a procession of squaws carrying pumpkins so heavy we interceded now and then to help them, and carrying tubs of "chili con carne"—roast meat and chili—and of frijoles (beans).
At eleven we all lay down to try to sleep, the girls chaffing one another a great deal. I had expected to meet Wilfrid Ewart and the poet Witter Bynner at the Zunyi Dance, and we heard they had arrived. But in these first hours they eluded us. I do not know whether it was the expectation of meeting Ewart or Bynner or merely the spirit of the age, but the two pretty nieces, of which perhaps Betty was the more vain (though who can say?), insisted on curling their hair at one in the morning. They had brought curling tongs with them, and so relit the oil lamp and heated the tongs in the glass chimney and laboriously curled each beautiful lock. We men watched them from the floor, with half-closed eyes. Then we got up also and sallied forth into the ice-bound streets and visited the shrines again.
By that time the Indians had feasted their guests and all the dances were in full activity. Where before in the hall of a Shaleco house had been the drone and the stillness of prayers before a shrine there was now the gayety of marvelous ritual dances and Nature ballets.
The Shaleco and the Mudheads were dancing together. I imagine that Shaleco is the Spanish name for the Bird-god of the Zunyi Indians. Chaleco is Spanish for a vest, and the chief characteristic of the Bird-god is his beautiful embroidered vests which hang over interior hoops and fold over one another. The Bird is nine or ten feet high. Imagine, therefore, how high the rooms in which he dances! He is an astonishing bird. He wears a sun halo of eagles' feathers, he has horns of turquoise color, and at his throat is a voluminous black ruff of thickly clustered little feathers. Black holes are his eyes, and his beak is a long, straight, cleft piece of wood which opens and shuts and clack-clacks in menace or in mirth. The embroidered vests below are of turquoise color fading toward green. Inside all this, of course, is a hidden Indian, hidden in all except his moccasins.
The Mudheads, in contrast to the Shalecos, were almost naked and were ugly. Their bodies were painted mud color (adobe color), and they wore over their natural heads a mask of misshapenness. They looked like badly made men of mud—as if some journeyman had made man. There were knobs on their heads, finger holes for eyes; they had protruding, bottle-neck mouths. They wore no jewelry, but round their middles hung a slit kilt of black material, and as they danced their bare, mud-colored hips slipped in and out.
I was told they represented in mythology the offspring of a brother and sister. Their function, however, was that of clowns. I took their real symbolism to mean, human beings in the presence of the Nature god, absurd and ugly. When the Shalecos had returned to the mountains I noticed that the Mudheads took off their masks and danced seriously and beautifully again.
But in the strange midnight the Shalecos in the dance constantly chased them. There was something whimsical in the expression of the Shaleco, especially when it leaped forward dancing from the shrine. It ran like a bird and squeaked and clack-clacked as it ran. Katharine Voigt took the attention of the Shaleco directly she entered the first hall. Was it her bright red tam-o-shanter or her curled locks? I cannot say. But he flew at her across the room so that she retreated whilst the Bird, with the lightest of turns, had checked its speedy advance and was returning to the shrine, and the four Mudheads present were mumming and spluttering and step-dancing back and forth in ungainly gestures, and the chorus of singers and drummers at the back of the room kept the throb of time. Scores of Indians watched from the sides, scores crowded the doorways, the light of the large lamps above was warm and bright, and the dancing never ceased.
We went from house to house. At another house a band of Zunyis were dancing a Navajo dance in honor of the Navajos present. At another the Longhorns were dancing. The Longhorns had mitered heads of red and blue, masked, hidden faces, black feather-ruffs at the throat like that of the Shaleco, but bare body and legs and beautiful brown moccasins. They carried in their hands spears of horn and a bunch of twigs. In their dance the chief movement was a running forward with bent knees, like a Roman soldier spear in hand. But they smote no one till the dance was over next day. Then I believe they smote every one they could.
In another hall danced a buckskin-headed child of dawn with a white taperlike point on the height of his head and a crimson diadem set with silver conches about his brows; a beautiful and serene figure, and one of the most delicate of the dancers. It was in the house where he was dancing that I met the poet Bynner, tired and yet spellbound. "This is the most beautiful of them all, I think," he said. The dance was pure poetry to him.
In another room danced the Firegod, naked blackened, ugly. His whole body was soot colored and he had, like a string about his middle, the meanest of loin cloths. Far from being a Firegod he seemed an uncouth savage. But with him danced two Shaleco Birds, a Longhorn, and six Mudheads, and they made an astonishing medley.
Away in a corner, long-haired, long-faced, sat the chorus, with wide-open mouths, never ceasing their Ho-i-ho, ho-ho-ho, ha-ha-ha-ha, and beating on their tiny drums. Resplendent scarlet and orange colors lined the walls, the blanket cloaks of the tall, Moorish-looking Navajo Indians. Wampum glittered on every wall. Eyes glittered also. Glittered also the embroidered vests and strange blue horns of the Shaleco Birds—only the Mudheads made dissonance and disharmony, bubbling through their mud masks and calling out obscenities and bad jokes and posturing misshapenness. But all moved, back and forth, back and forth, tripping it, turning, marking time, waving hands to the time of the tomtoms in the corner.
What the Spaniards of Coronado thought of all this has not been recorded. Their eyes sought gold—but this is not a gold country; the Indians do not wear it, do not seek it. Even to take all their silver and turquoise away is not to equal one or even one tenth of the value of one of Montezuma's presents to Hernan Cortes. They must have been annoyed. The Shalecos, the Mudheads, the Longhorns! Had they ridden five hundred leagues to see these?