Mornings in Mexico

By D. H. Lawrence

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Title: Mornings in Mexico

Author: D. H. Lawrence

Release date: January 7, 2026 [eBook #77641]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Martin Secker, 1927

Credits: Paul Fatula, Tim Lindell, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


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MORNINGS IN MEXICO




  These essays have appeared in
  _The Theatre Arts Monthly_, in
  _The Adelphi_, in _Travel_, and in
  _The Laughing Horse_, and thanks
  are due to the respective editors
  of these publications.


  LONDON: MARTIN SECKER LIMITED
  NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI




  MORNINGS IN
  MEXICO

  By
  D. H. LAWRENCE

  LONDON:
  MARTIN SECKER
  1927




  TO
  MABEL LUJAN




CONTENTS


                                    PAGE

  CORASMIN AND THE PARROTS             9

  WALK TO HUAYAPA                     27

  THE MOZO                            55

  MARKET DAY                          79

  INDIANS AND ENTERTAINMENT           97

  THE DANCE OF THE SPROUTING CORN    121

  THE HOPI SNAKE DANCE               135

  A LITTLE MOONSHINE WITH LEMON      173




CORASMIN AND THE PARROTS




_Corasmin and the Parrots_


One says Mexico: one means, after all, one little town away South in
the Republic: and in this little town, one rather crumbly adobe house
built round two sides of a garden _patio_: and of this house, one spot
on the deep, shady verandah facing inwards to the trees, where there
are an onyx table and three rocking-chairs and one little wooden chair,
a pot with carnations, and a person with a pen. We talk so grandly,
in capital letters, about Morning in Mexico. All it amounts to is one
little individual looking at a bit of sky and trees, then looking down
at the page of his exercise book.

It is a pity we don’t always remember this. When books come out with
grand titles, like _The Future of America_ or _The European Situation_,
it’s a pity we don’t immediately visualize a thin or a fat person, in
a chair or in bed, dictating to a bob-haired stenographer or making
little marks on paper with a fountain pen.

Still, it is morning, and it is Mexico. The sun shines. But then,
during the winter, it always shines. It is pleasant to sit out of doors
and write, just fresh enough, and just warm enough. But then it is
Christmas next week, so it ought to be just right.

There is a little smell of carnations, because they are the nearest
thing. And there is a resinous smell of ocote wood, and a smell of
coffee, and a faint smell of leaves, and of Morning, and even of
Mexico. Because when all is said and done, Mexico has a faint, physical
scent of her own, as each human being has. And this is a curious,
inexplicable scent, in which there are resin and perspiration and
sunburned earth and urine among other things.

And cocks are still crowing. The little mill where the natives have
their corn ground is puffing rather languidly. And because some women
are talking in the entrance-way, the two tame parrots in the trees have
started to whistle.

The parrots, even when I don’t listen to them, have an extraordinary
effect on me. They make my diaphragm convulse with little laughs,
almost mechanically. They are a quite commonplace pair of green birds,
with bits of bluey red, and round, disillusioned eyes, and heavy,
overhanging noses. But they listen intently. And they reproduce. The
pair whistle now like Rosalino, who is sweeping the _patio_ with a twig
broom; and yet it is so unlike him, to be whistling full vent, when any
of us is around, that one looks at him to see. And the moment one sees
him, with his black head bent rather drooping and hidden as he sweeps,
one laughs.

The parrots whistle exactly like Rosalino, only a little more so. And
this little-more-so is extremely, sardonically funny. With their sad
old long-jowled faces and their flat disillusioned eyes, they reproduce
Rosalino and a little-more-so without moving a muscle. And Rosalino,
sweeping the _patio_ with his twig broom, scraping the tittering leaves
into little heaps, covers himself more and more with the cloud of his
own obscurity. He doesn’t rebel. He is powerless. Up goes the wild,
sliding Indian whistle into the morning, very powerful, with an immense
energy seeming to drive behind it. And always, always a little more
than lifelike.

Then they break off into a cackling chatter, and one knows they are
shifting their clumsy legs, perhaps hanging on with their beaks and
clutching with their cold, slow claws, to climb to a higher bough,
like rather raggedy green buds climbing to the sun. And suddenly, the
penetrating, demonish mocking voices:

“Perro! Oh, Perro! Perr-rro! Oh, Perr-rro! Perro!”

They are imitating somebody calling the dog. _Perro_ means dog. But
that any creature should be able to pour such a suave, prussic-acid
sarcasm over the voice of a human being calling a dog, is incredible.
One’s diaphragm chuckles involuntarily. And one thinks: _Is it
possible?_ Is it possible that we are so absolutely, so innocently, so
_ab ovo_ ridiculous?

And not only is it possible, it is patent. We cover our heads in
confusion.

Now they are yapping like a dog: exactly like Corasmin. Corasmin is a
little fat, curly white dog who was lying in the sun a minute ago, and
has now come into the verandah shade, walking with slow resignation,
to lie against the wall near by my chair. “Yap-yap-yap! Wouf! Wouf!
Yapyapyapyap!!” go the parrots, exactly like Corasmin when some
stranger comes into the _zaguan_. Corasmin and a little-more-so.

With a grin on my face I look down at Corasmin. And with a silent,
abashed resignation in his yellow eyes, Corasmin looks up at me, with
a touch of reproach. His little white nose is sharp, and under his
eyes there are dark marks, as under the eyes of one who has known much
trouble. All day he does nothing but walk resignedly out of the sun,
when the sun gets too hot, and out of the shade, when the shade gets
too cool. And bite ineffectually in the region of his fleas.

Poor old Corasmin: he is only about six, but resigned, unspeakably
resigned. Only not humble. He does not kiss the rod. He rises in spirit
above it, letting his body lie.

“Perro! Oh, Perr-rro! Perr-rro! Perr-rr-rro!!” shriek the parrots, with
that strange penetrating, antediluvian malevolence that seems to make
even the trees prick their ears. It is a sound that penetrates one
straight at the diaphragm, belonging to the ages before brains were
invented. And Corasmin pushes his sharp little nose into his bushy
tail, closes his eyes because I am grinning, feigns to sleep; and then,
in an orgasm of self-consciousness, starts up to bite in the region of
his fleas.

“Perr-rro! Perr-rro!” And then a restrained, withheld sort of yapping.
The fiendish rolling of the Spanish “r,” malevolence rippling out
of all the vanished, spiteful æons. And following it, the small,
little-curly-dog sort of yapping. They can make their voices so
devilishly small and futile, like a little curly dog. And follow it
up with that ringing malevolence that swoops up the ladders of the
sunbeams right to the stars, rolling the Spanish “r.”

Corasmin slowly walks away from the verandah, his head drooped, and
flings himself down in the sun. No! He gets up again, in an agony of
self-control, and scratches the earth loose a little, to soften his
lie. Then flings himself down again.

Invictus! The still-unconquered Corasmin! The sad little white curly
pendulum oscillating ever slower between the shadow and the sun.

    In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud,
    Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

But that is human bombast, and a little too ridiculous even for
Corasmin. Poor old Corasmin’s clear yellow eyes! He is going to be
master of his own soul, under all the vitriol those parrots pour over
him. But he’s not going to throw out his chest in a real lust of
self-pity. That belongs to the next cycle of evolution.

I wait for the day when the parrots will start throwing English at us,
in the pit of our stomachs. They cock their heads and listen to our
gabble. But so far they haven’t got it. It puzzles them. Castilian, and
Corasmin, and Rosalino come more natural.

Myself, I don’t believe in evolution, like a long string hooked on to
a First Cause, and being slowly twisted in unbroken continuity through
the ages. I prefer to believe in what the Aztecs called Suns: that is,
Worlds successively created and destroyed. The sun itself convulses,
and the worlds go out like so many candles when somebody coughs in the
middle of them. Then subtly, mysteriously, the sun convulses again, and
a new set of worlds begins to flicker alight.

This pleases my fancy better than the long and weary twisting of the
rope of Time and Evolution, hitched on to the revolving hook of a First
Cause. I like to think of the whole show going bust, _bang!_--and
nothing but bits of chaos flying about. Then out of the dark, new
little twinklings reviving from nowhere, nohow.

I like to think of the world going pop! when the lizards had grown
too unwieldy, and it was time they were taken down a peg or two. Then
the little humming birds beginning to spark in the darkness, and a
whole succession of birds shaking themselves clean of the dark matrix,
flamingoes rising upon one leg like dawn commencing, parrots shrieking
about at midday, _almost_ able to talk, then peacocks unfolding at
evening like the night with stars. And apart from these little, pure
birds, a lot of unwieldy skinny-necked monsters bigger than crocodiles,
barging through the mosses; till it was time to put a stop to them.
When someone mysteriously touched the button, and the sun went bang,
with smithereens of birds bursting in all directions. Only a few
parrots’ eggs and peacocks’ eggs and eggs of flamingoes smuggling in
some safe nook, to hatch on the next Day, when the animals arose.

Up reared the elephant, and shook the mud off his back. The birds
watched him in sheer stupefaction. What? _What in heaven’s name is this
wingless, beakless old perambulator?_

No good, oh birds! Curly, little white Corasmin ran yapping out of
the undergrowth, the new undergrowth, till parrots, going white at
the gills, flew off into the ancientest recesses. Then the terrific
neighing of the wild horse was heard in the twilight for the first
time, and the bellowing of lions through the night.

And the birds were sad. What is this? they said. A whole vast gamut of
new noises. A universe of new voices.

Then the birds under the leaves hung their heads and were dumb. No good
our making a sound, they said. We are superseded.

The great big, booming, half-naked birds were blown to smithereens.
Only the real little feathery individuals hatched out again and
remained. This was a consolation. The larks and warblers cheered up,
and began to say their little say, out of the old “Sun,” to the new
sun. But the peacock, and the turkey, and the raven, and the parrot
above all, they could not get over it. Because, in the old days of the
Sun of Birds, they had been the big guns. The parrot had been the old
boss of the flock. He was so clever.

Now he was, so to speak, up a tree. Nor dare he come down, because of
the toddling little curly white Corasmin, and such-like, down below.
He felt absolutely bitter. That wingless, beakless, featherless,
curly, misshapen bird’s nest of a Corasmin had usurped the face of the
earth, waddling about, whereas his Grace, the heavy-nosed old Duke of a
parrot, was forced to sit out of reach up a tree, dispossessed.

So, like the riff-raff up in the gallery at the theatre, aloft in
the Paradiso of the vanished Sun, he began to whistle and jeer.
“_Yap-yap!_” said his new little lordship of a Corasmin. “Ye Gods!”
cried the parrot. “Hear him forsooth! _Yap-yap!_ he says! Could
anything be more imbecile? Yap-yap! Oh, Sun of the Birds, hark at that!
_Yap-yap-yap!_ Perro! _Perro! Perr-rro!_ Oh, _Perr-rr-rro!_”

The parrot had found his cue. Stiff-nosed, heavy-nosed old duke of
the birds, he wasn’t going to give in and sing a new song, like those
fool brown thrushes and nightingales. Let them twitter and warble. The
parrot was a gentleman of the old school. He was going to jeer now!
Like an ineffectual old aristocrat.

“_Oh, Perr-rro! Perr-rro-o-o-o!_”

The Aztecs say there have been four Suns, and ours is the fifth. The
first Sun, a tiger, or a jaguar, a night-spotted monster of rage,
rose out of nowhere and swallowed it, with all its huge, mercifully
forgotten insects along with it. The second Sun blew up in a great
wind: that was when the big lizards must have collapsed. The third
Sun burst in water, and drowned all the animals that were considered
unnecessary, together with the first attempts at animal men.

Out of the floods rose our own Sun, and little naked man. “Hello!”
said the old elephant. “What’s that noise?” And he pricked his ears,
listening to a new voice on the face of the earth. The sound of man,
and _words_ for the first time. Terrible, unheard-of sound! The
elephant dropped his tail and ran into the deep jungle, and there stood
looking down his nose.

But little white curly Corasmin was fascinated. “_Come on! Perro!
Perro!_” called the naked two-legged one. And Corasmin, fascinated,
said to himself: “Can’t hold out against that name. Shall have to go!”
so off he trotted, at the heels of the naked one. Then came the horse,
then the elephant, spell-bound at being given a name. The other animals
ran for their lives, and stood quaking.

In the dust, however, the snake, the oldest dethroned king of all,
bit his tail once more and said to himself: “_Here’s another! No end
to these new lords of creation! But I’ll bruise his heel! Just as I
swallow the eggs of the parrot, and lick up the little Corasmin-pups._”

And in the branches, the parrot said to himself: “_Hello! What’s this
new sort of half-bird? Why, he’s got Corasmin trotting at his heels!
Must be a new sort of boss! Let’s listen to him, and see if I can’t
take him off._”

Perr-rro! Perr-rr-rro-oo! Oh, Perro!

The parrot had hit it.

And the monkey, cleverest of creatures, cried with rage when he heard
men speaking. “_Oh, why couldn’t I do it!_” he chattered. But no good,
he belonged to the old Sun. So he sat and gibbered across the invisible
gulf in time, which is the “other dimension” that clever people gas
about: calling it “fourth dimension,” as if you could measure it with a
foot-rule, the same as the obedient other three dimensions.

If you come to think of it, when you look at the monkey you are looking
straight into the other dimension. He’s got length and breadth and
height all right, and he’s in the same universe of Space and Time as
you are. But there’s another dimension. He’s different. There’s no rope
of evolution linking him to you, like a navel string. No! Between you
and him there’s a cataclysm and another dimension. It’s no good. You
can’t link him up. Never will. It’s the other dimension.

He mocks at you and gibes at you and imitates you. Sometimes he is even
more _like_ you than you are yourself. It’s funny, and you laugh just a
bit on the wrong side of your face. It’s the other dimension.

He stands in one Sun, you in another. He whisks his tail in one Day,
you scratch your head in another. He jeers at you, and is afraid of
you. You laugh at him and are frightened of him.

What’s the length and the breadth, what’s the height and the depths
between you and me? says the monkey.

You get out a tape-measure, and he flies into an obscene mockery of you.

It’s the other dimension, put the tape-measure away, it won’t serve.

“Perro! Oh, Perr-rro!” shrieks the parrot.

Corasmin looks up at me, as much as to say:

“It’s the other dimension. There’s no help for it. Let us agree about
it.”

And I look down into his yellow eyes, and say:

“You’re quite right, Corasmin, it’s the other dimension. You and I, we
admit it. But the parrot won’t, and the monkey won’t, and the crocodile
won’t, neither the earwig. They all wind themselves up and wriggle
inside the cage of the other dimension, hating it. And those that have
voices jeer, and those that have mouths bite, and the insects that
haven’t even mouths, they turn up their tails and nip with them, or
sting. Just behaving according to their own dimension: which, for me,
is the other dimension.”

And Corasmin wags his tail mildly, and looks at me with real wisdom in
his eyes. He and I, we understand each other in the wisdom of the other
dimension.

But the flat, saucer-eyed parrot won’t have it. Just won’t have it.

“Oh, Perro! Perr-rro! Perr-rro-o-o-o! Yap-yap-yap!”

And Rosalino, the Indian _mozo_, looks up at me with his eyes veiled
by their own blackness. We won’t have it either: he is hiding and
repudiating. Between us also is the gulf of the other dimension, and he
wants to bridge it with the foot-rule of the three-dimensional space.
He knows it can’t be done. So do I. Each of us knows the other knows.

But he can imitate me, even more than life-like. As the parrot can him.
And I have to laugh at his _me_, a bit on the wrong side of my face, as
he has to grin on the wrong side of his face when I catch his eye as
the parrot is whistling _him_. With a grin, with a laugh we pay tribute
to the other dimension. But Corasmin is wiser. In his clear, yellow
eyes is the self-possession of full admission.

The Aztecs said this world, our Sun, would blow up from inside, in
earthquakes. Then what will come, in the other dimension, when we are
superseded?




WALK TO HUAYAPA




_Walk to Huayapa_


Curious is the psychology of Sunday. Humanity enjoying itself is on
the whole a dreary spectacle, and holidays are more disheartening than
drudgery. One makes up one’s mind: On Sundays and on _fiestas_ I will
stay at home, in the hermitage of the _patio_, with the parrots and
Corasmin and the reddening coffee-berries. I will avoid the sight of
people “enjoying themselves”--or try to, without much success.

Then comes Sunday morning, with the peculiar looseness of its sunshine.
And even if _you_ keep mum, the better-half says: Let’s go somewhere.

But, thank God, in Mexico at least one can’t set off in the “machine.”
It is a question of a meagre horse and a wooden saddle; or a donkey;
or what we called, as children, “Shanks’ pony”--the shanks referring
discourteously to one’s own legs.

We will go out of the town. “Rosalino, we are going for a walk to San
Felipe de las Aguas. Do you want to go, and carry the basket?”

“_Come no, Señor?_”

It is Rosalino’s inevitable answer, as inevitable as the parrot’s
“Perro!” “_Come no, Señor?_”--“How not, Señor?”

The Norte, the north-wind, was blowing last night, rattling the
worm-chewed window-frames.

“Rosalino, I am afraid you will be cold in the night.”

“_Come no, Señor?_”

“Would you like a blanket?”

“_Come no, Señor?_”

“With this you will be warm?”

“_Come no, Señor?_”

But the morning is perfect; in a moment we are clear out of the town.
Most towns in Mexico, saving the capital, end in themselves, at once.
As if they had been lowered from heaven in a napkin, and deposited,
rather foreign, upon the wild plain. So we walk round the wall of the
church and the huge old monastery enclosure that is now barracks for
the scrap-heap soldiery, and at once there are the hills.

“I will lift up my eyes until the hills, whence cometh my strength.”
At least one can always do _that_, in Mexico. In a stride, the town
passes away. Before us lies the gleaming, pinkish-ochre of the valley
flat, wild and exalted with sunshine. On the left, quite near,
bank the stiffly pleated mountains, all the foot-hills, that press
savannah-coloured into the savannah of the valley. The mountains are
clothed smokily with pine, _ocote_, and, like a woman in a gauze
_rebozo_, they rear in a rich blue fume that is almost cornflower-blue
in the clefts. It is their characteristic, that they are darkest-blue
at the top. Like some splendid lizard with a wavering, royal-blue crest
down the ridge of his back, and pale belly, and soft, pinky-fawn claws,
on the plain.

Between the pallor of the claws, a dark spot of trees, and white dots
of a church with twin towers. Further away, along the foot-hills, a few
scattered trees, white dot and stroke of a _hacienda_, and a green,
green square of sugar-cane. Further off still, at the mouth of a cleft
of a canyon, a dense little green patch of trees, and two spots of
proud church.

“Rosalino, which is San Felipe?”

“_Quien sabe, Señor?_” says Rosalino, looking at the villages beyond
the sun of the savannah with black, visionless eyes. In his voice is
the inevitable flat resonance of aloofness, touched with resignation,
as if to say: It is not becoming to a man to know these things.--Among
the Indians it is not becoming to know anything, not even one’s own
name.

Rosalino is a mountain boy, an Indian from a village two days’ walk
away. But he has been two years in the little city, and has learnt his
modicum of Spanish.

“Have you never been to any of these villages?”

“No, Señor, I never went.”

“Didn’t you want to?”

“_Come no, Señor?_”

The Americans would call him a dumb-bell.

We decide for the farthest speck of a village in a dark spot of trees.
It lies so magical, alone, tilted on the fawn-pink slope, again as if
the dark-green napkin with a few white tiny buildings had been lowered
from heaven and left, there at the foot of the mountains, with the
deep groove of a canyon slanting in behind. So alone and, as it were,
detached from the world in which it lies, a spot.

Nowhere more than in Mexico does human life become isolated, external
to its surroundings, and cut off tinily from the environment. Even as
you come across the plain to a big city like Guadalajara, and see the
twin towers of the cathedral peering around in loneliness like two lost
birds side by side on a moor, lifting their white heads to look around
in the wilderness, your heart gives a clutch, feeling the pathos, the
isolated tininess of human effort. As for building a church with one
tower only, it is unthinkable. There must be two towers, to keep each
other company in this wilderness world.

The morning is still early, the brilliant sun does not burn too much.
To-morrow is the shortest day. The savannah valley is shadeless,
spotted only with the thorny ravel of _mesquite_ bushes. Down the
trail that has worn grooves in the turf--the rock is near the
surface--occasional donkeys with a blue-hooded woman perched on top
come tripping in silence, twinkling, a shadow. Just occasional women
taking a few vegetables to market. Practically no men. It is Sunday.

Rosalino, prancing behind with the basket, plucks up his courage to
speak to one of the women passing on a donkey. “Is that San Felipe
where we are going?”--“No, that is not San Felipe.”--“What, then, is it
called?”--“It is called Huayapa.”--“Which, then, is San Felipe?”--“That
one”--and she points to her right.

They have spoken to each other in half-audible, crushed tones, as they
always do, the woman on the donkey and the woman with her on foot
swerving away from the basket-carrying Rosalino. They all swerve away
from us, as if we were potential bold brigands. It really gets one’s
pecker up. The presence of the Señora only half reassures them. For the
Señora, in a plain hat of bluey-green woven grass, and a dress of white
cotton with black squares on it, is almost a monster of unusualness.
_Prophet art thou, bird, or devil?_ the women seem to say, as they look
at her with keen black eyes. I think they choose to decide she is more
of the last.

The women look at the woman, the men look at the man. And always with
that same suspicious, enquiring, wondering look, the same with which
Edgar Allen Poe must have looked at his momentous raven:

“_Prophet art thou, bird, or devil?_”

_Devil, then, to please you!_ one longs to answer, in a tone of
_Nevermore_.

Ten o’clock, and the sun getting hot. Not a spot of shade, apparently,
from here to Huayapa. The blue getting thinner on the mountains, and an
indiscernible vagueness, of too much light, descending on the plain.

The road suddenly dips into a little crack, where runs a creek. This
again is characteristic of these parts of America. Water keeps out
of sight. Even the biggest rivers, even the tiny brooks. You look
across a plain on which the light sinks down, and you think: Dry! Dry!
Absolutely dry! You travel along, and suddenly come to a crack in the
earth, and a little stream is running in a little walled-in valley bed,
where is a half-yard of green turf, and bushes, the _palo-blanco_ with
leaves, and with big white flowers like pure white, crumpled cambric.
Or you may come to a river a thousand feet below, sheer below you. But
not in this valley. Only the stream.

“Shade!” says the Señora, subsiding under a steep bank.

“_Mucho calor!_” says Rosalino, taking off his extra-jaunty straw hat,
and subsiding with the basket.

Down the slope are coming two women on donkeys. Seeing the terrible
array of three people sitting under a bank, they pull up.

“_Adios!_” I say, with firm resonance.

“_Adios!_” says the Señora, with diffidence.

“_Adios!_” says the reticent Rosalino, his voice the shadow of ours.

“_Adios! Adios! Adios!_” say the women, in suppressed voices, swerving,
neutral, past us on their self-contained, sway-eared asses.

When they have passed, Rosalino looks at me to see if I shall laugh.
I give a little grin, and he gives me back a great explosive grin,
throwing back his head in silence, opening his wide mouth and showing
his soft pink tongue, looking along his cheeks with his saurian black
eyes, in an access of _farouche_ derision.

A great hawk, like an eagle, with white bars at the end of its wings,
sweeps low over us, looking for snakes. One can hear the hiss of its
pinions.

“_Gabilan_,” says Rosalino.

“What is it called in the _idioma_?”

“_Psia!_”--He makes the consonants explode and hiss.

“Ah!” says the Señora. “One hears it in the wings. _Psia!_”

“Yes,” says Rosalino, with black eyes of incomprehension.

Down the creek, two native boys, little herdsmen, are bathing,
stooping with knees together and throwing water over themselves,
rising, gleaming dark coffee-red in the sun, wetly. They are very dark,
and their wet heads are so black, they seem to give off a bluish light,
like dark electricity.

The great cattle they are tending slowly plunge through the bushes,
coming up-stream. At the place where the path fords the stream, a great
ox stoops to drink. Comes a cow after him, and a calf, and a young
bull. They all drink a little at the stream, their noses delicately
touching the water. And then the young bull, horns abranch, stares
fixedly, with some of the same Indian wonder-and-suspicion stare, at us
sitting under the bank.

Up jumps the Señora, proceeds uphill, trying to save her dignity. The
bull, slowly leaning into motion, moves across-stream like a ship
unmoored. The bathing-lad on the bank is hastily fastening his calico
pantaloons round his ruddy-dark waist. The Indians have a certain rich
physique, even this lad. He comes running short-step down the bank,
uttering a bird-like whoop, his dark hair gleaming bluish. Stooping
for a moment to select a stone, he runs athwart the bull, and aims the
stone sideways at him. There is a thud, the ponderous, adventurous
young animal swerves docilely round towards the stream. “_Becerro!_”
cries the boy, in his bird-like, piping tone, selecting a stone to
throw at the calf.

We proceed in the blazing sun up the slope. There is a white line
at the foot of the trees. It looks like water running white over a
weir. The supply of the town water comes this way. Perhaps this is a
reservoir. A sheet of water! How lovely it would be, in this country,
if there was a sheet of water with a stream running out of it! And
those dense trees of Huayapa behind.

“What is that white, Rosalino? Is it water?”

“_El blanco? Si, agua, Señora_,” says that dumb-bell.

Probably, if the Señora had said: Is it milk? he would have replied in
exactly the same way: _Si, es leche, Señora!_--Yes, it’s milk.

Hot, silent, walking only amidst a weight of light, out of which one
hardly sees, we climb the spurs towards the dark trees. And as we draw
nearer, the white slowly resolves into a broken, whitewashed wall.

“Oh!” exclaims the Señora, in real disappointment. “It isn’t water!
It’s a wall!”

“_Si, Señora. Es panteón._” (They call a cemetery a _panteón_, down
here.)

“It is a cemetery,” announces Rosalino, with a certain ponderous,
pleased assurance, and without afterthought. But when I suddenly laugh
at the absurdity, he also gives a sudden broken yelp of laughter.--They
laugh as if it were against their will, as if it hurt them, giving
themselves away.

It was nearing midday. At last we got into a shady lane, in which
were puddles of escaped irrigation-water. The ragged semi-squalor of
a half-tropical lane, with naked trees sprouting into spiky scarlet
flowers, and bushes with biggish yellow flowers, sitting rather wearily
on their stems, led to the village.

We were entering Huayapa. _Iª Calle de las Minas_, said an old notice.
_Iª Calle de las Minas_, said a new, brand-new, notice, as if in
confirmation. _First Street of the Mines._ And every street had the
same old and brand-new notice: 1st. Street of the Magnolia: 4th Street
of Enriquez Gonzalez: very fine!

But the First Street of the Mines was just a track between the stiff
living fence of organ cactus, with _poinsettia_ trees holding up
scarlet mops of flowers, and mango trees, tall and black, stonily
drooping the strings of unripe fruit. The Street of the Magnolia was
a rocky stream-gutter, disappearing to nowhere from nowhere, between
cactus and bushes. The Street of the Vasquez was a stony stream-bed,
emerging out of tall, wildly tall reeds.

Not a soul anywhere. Through the fences, half-deserted gardens of trees
and banana plants, each enclosure with a half-hidden hut of black adobe
bricks crowned with a few old tiles for a roof, and perhaps a new wing
made of twigs. Everything hidden, secret, silent. A sense of darkness
among the silent mango trees, a sense of lurking, of unwillingness.
Then actually some half-bold curs barking at us across the stile of
one garden, a forked bough over which one must step to enter the
chicken-bitten enclosure. And actually a man crossing the proudly
labelled: Fifth Street of the Independence.

If there were no churches to mark a point in these villages, there
would be nowhere at all to make for. The sense of nowhere is intense,
between the dumb and repellent living fence of cactus. But the
Spaniards, in the midst of these black, mud-brick huts, have inevitably
reared the white twin-towered magnificence of a big and lonely,
hopeless church; and where there is a church there will be a _plaza_.
And a _plaza_ is a _zocalo_, a hub. Even though the wheel does not go
round, a hub is still a hub. Like the old Forum.

So we stray diffidently on, in the maze of streets which are only
straight tracks between cactuses, till we see _Reforma_, and at the end
of _Reforma_, the great church.

In front of the church is a rocky _plaza_ leaking with grass, with
water rushing into two big, oblong stone basins. The great church
stands rather ragged, in a dense forlornness, for all the world like
some big white human being, in rags, held captive in a world of ants.

On the uphill side of the _plaza_, a long low white building with a
shed in front, and under the shed, crowding, all the short-statured men
of the _pueblo_, in their white cotton clothes and big hats. They are
listening to something: but the silence is heavy, furtive, secretive.
They stir like white-clad insects.

Rosalino looks sideways at them, and sheers away. Even we lower our
voices to ask what is going on. Rosalino replies, _sotto voce_,
that they are making _asuntos_. But what business? we insist. The
dark faces of the little men under the big hats look round at us
suspiciously, like dark gaps in the atmosphere. Our alien presence,
in this vacuous village, is like the sound of a drum in a churchyard.
Rosalino mumbles unintelligibly. We stray across the forlorn yard into
the church.

Thursday was the day of the Virgin of the Soledad, so the church is
littered with flowers, sprays of wild yellow flower trailing on the
floor. There is a great Gulliver’s Travels fresco picture of an angel
having a joy-ride on the back of a Goliath. On the left, near the altar
steps, is seated a life-size Christ--undersized; seated upon a little
table, wearing a pair of woman’s frilled knickers, a little mantle of
purple silk dangling from His back, and His face bent forward gazing
fatuously at His naked knee, which emerges from the needlework frill
of the drawers. Across from Him a living woman is half-hidden behind a
buttress, mending something, sewing.

We sit silent, motionless, in the whitewashed church ornamented with
royal blue and bits of gilt. A barefoot Indian with a high-domed head
comes in and kneels with his legs close together, his back stiff, at
once very humble and resistant. His cotton jacket and trousers are
long-unwashed rag, the colour of dry earth, and torn, so that one sees
smooth pieces of brown thigh, and brown back. He kneels in a sort of
intense fervour for a minute, then gets up and childishly, almost
idiotically, begins to take the pieces of candle from the candlesticks.
He is the Verger.

Outside, the gang of men is still pressing under the shed. We insist on
knowing what is going on. Rosalino, looking sideways at them, plucks up
courage to say plainly that the two men at the table are canvassing for
votes: for the Government, for the State, for a new governor, whatever
it may be. Votes! Votes! Votes! The farce of it! Already on the wall
of the low building, on which one sees, in blue letters, the word
_Justizia_, there are pasted the late political posters, with the loud
announcement: Vote For This Mark [Illustration: Two concentric circles
with center dot]. Or another: Vote For This Mark [Illustration: Circle
with center dot].

My dear fellow, this is when democracy becomes real fun. You vote for
one red ring inside another red ring, and you get a Julio Echegaray.
You vote for a blue dot inside a blue ring, and you get a Socrate
Ezequiel Tos. Heaven knows what you get for the two little red circles
on top of one another [Illustration: Two circles arranged vertically].
Suppose we vote, and try. There’s all sorts in the lucky bag. There
might come a name like Peregrino Zenon Cocotilla.

Independence! Government by the People, of the People, for the People!
We all live in the Calle de la Reforma, in Mexico.

On the bottom of the _plaza_ is a shop. We want some fruit. “_Hay
frutas?_ Oranges or bananas?”--“No, Señor.”--“No fruits?”--“_No
hay!_”--“Can I buy a cup?”--“_No hay._”--“Can I buy a _jicara_, a
gourd-shell that we might drink from?” “_No hay._”

_No hay_ means _there isn’t any_, and it’s the most regular sound made
by the prevailing dumb-bells of the land.

“What is there, then?” A sickly grin. There are, as a matter of fact,
candles, soap, dead and withered chiles, a few dried grasshoppers,
dust, and stark, bare wooden pigeon-holes. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
Next-door is another little hole of a shop. _Hay frutas?_--_No
hay._--_Qué hay?_--_Hay tepache!_

“_Para borracharse_,” says Rosalino, with a great grin.

_Tepache_ is a fermented drink of pineapple rinds and brown sugar: to
get drunk on, as Rosalino says. But mildly drunk. There is probably
_mescal_ too, to get brutally drunk on.

The village is exhausted in resource. But we insist on fruit. Where,
_where_ can I buy oranges and bananas? I see oranges on the trees, I
see banana plants.

“Up there!” The woman waves with her hand as if she were cutting the
air upwards.

“That way?”

“Yes.”

We go up the Street of Independence. They have got rid of us from the
_plaza_.

Another black hut with a yard, and orange-trees beyond.

“_Hay frutas?_”

“_No hay._”

“Not an orange, nor a banana?”

“_No hay._”

We go on. _She_ has got rid of us. We descend the black rocky steps to
the stream, and up the other side, past the high reeds. There is a yard
with heaps of maize in a shed, and tethered bullocks: and a bare-bosom,
black-browed girl.

“_Hay frutas?_”

“_No hay._”

“But yes! There are oranges--there!”

She turns and looks at the oranges on the trees at the back, and
imbecilely answers:

“_No hay._”

It is a choice between killing her and hurrying away.

We hear a drum and a whistle. It is down a rocky black track that calls
itself The Street of Benito Juarez: the same old gent who stands for
all this obvious Reform, and Vote for [Illustration: Two concentric
circles].

A yard with shade round. Women kneading the maize dough, _masa_, for
_tortillas_. A man lounging. And a little boy beating a kettledrum
sideways, and a big man playing a little reedy wooden whistle, rapidly,
endlessly, disguising the tune of _La Cucuracha_. They won’t play a
tune unless they can render it almost unrecognisable.

“_Hay frutas?_”

“_No hay._”

“Then what is happening here?”

A sheepish look, and no answer.

“Why are you playing music?”

“It is a _fiesta_.”

My God, a feast! That weary _masa_, a millstone in the belly. And for
the rest, the blank, heavy, dark-grey barrenness, like an adobe brick.
The drum-boy rolls his big Indian eyes at us, and beats on, though
filled with consternation. The flute man glances, is half appalled and
half resentful, so he blows harder. The lounging man comes and mutters
to Rosalino, and Rosalino mutters back, four words.

Four words in the _idioma_, the Zapotec language. We retire, pushed
silently away.

“What language do they speak here, Rosalino?”

“The _idioma_.”

“You understand them? It is Zapoteca, same as your language?”

“Yes, Señor.”

“Then why do you always speak in Spanish to them?”

“Because they don’t speak the _idioma_ of my village.”

He means, presumably, that there are dialect differences. Anyhow, he
asserts his bit of Spanish, and says _Hay frutas?_

It was like a _posada_. It was like the Holy Virgin on Christmas Eve,
wandering from door to door looking for a lodging in which to bear her
child: Is there a room here? _No hay!_

The same with us. _Hay frutas?_ _No hay!_ We went down every straight
ant-run of that blessed village. But at last we pinned a good-natured
woman. “Now tell us, _where_ can we buy oranges? We see them on the
trees. We want them to eat.”

“Go,” she said, “to Valentino Ruiz. He has oranges. Yes, he has
oranges, and he sells them.” And she cut the air upwards with her hand.

From black hut to black hut went we, till at last we got to the house
of Valentino Ruiz. And lo! it was the yard with the _fiesta_. The
lounging man was peeping out of the gateless gateway, as we came, at us.

“It is the same place!” cried Rosalino, with a laugh of bashful agony.

But we don’t belong to the ruling race for nothing. Into the yard we
march.

“Is this the house of Valentino Ruiz? _Hay naranjas?_ Are there
oranges?”

We had wandered so long, and asked so often, that the _masa_ was made
into _tortillas_, the _tortillas_ were baked, and a group of people
were sitting in a ring on the ground, eating them. It was the _fiesta_.

At my question up jumped a youngish man, and a woman, as if they had
been sitting on a scorpion each.

“Oh, Señor,” said the woman, “there are few oranges, and they are not
ripe, as the Señor would want them. But pass this way.”

We pass up to the garden, past the pink roses, to a little orange-tree,
with a few yellowish-green oranges.

“You see, they are not ripe as you will want them,” says the youngish
man.

“They will do.” Tropical oranges are always green. These, we found
later, were almost insipidly sweet.

Even then, I can only get three of the big, thick-skinned, greenish
oranges. But I spy sweet limes, and insist on having five or six of
these.

He charges me three cents apiece for the oranges: the market price is
two for five cents: and one cent each for the _limas_.

“In my village,” mutters Rosalino when we get away, “oranges are five
for one cent.”

Never mind! It is one o’clock. Let us get out of the village, where the
water will be safe, and eat lunch.

In the _plaza_, the men are just dispersing, one gang coming down the
hill. They watch us as if we were coyote, a zopilote, and a white
she-bear walking together in the street.

“_Adios!_”

“_Adios!_” comes the low roll of reply, like a roll of cannon shot.

The water rushes downhill in a stone gutter beside the road. We climb
up the hill, up the Street of the Camomile, alongside the rushing
water. At one point it crosses the road unchannelled, and we wade
through it. It is the village drinking supply.

At the juncture of the roads, where the water crosses, another silent
white gang of men. Again: _Adios!_ and again the low, musical, deep
volley of _Adios!_

Up, up wearily. We must get above the village to be able to drink the
water without developing typhoid.

At last, the last house, the naked hills. We follow the water across
a dry maize-field, then up along a bank. Below is a quite deep gully.
Across is an orchard, and some women with baskets of fruit.

“_Hay frutas?_” calls Rosalino, in a half-voice. He is getting bold.

“_Hay_,” says an old woman, in the curious half-voice. “But not ripe.”

Shall we go down into the gully into the shade? No; someone is bathing
among the reeds below, and the aqueduct water rushes along in the
gutter here above. On, on, till we spy a wild guava tree over the
channel of water. At last we can sit down and eat and drink, on a bank
of dry grass, under the wild guava tree.

We put the bottle of lemonade in the aqueduct to cool. I scoop out a
big half-orange, the thick rind of which makes a cup.

“Look, Rosalino! The cup!”

“_La taza!_” he cries, soft-tongued, with a bark of laughter and
delight.

And one drinks the soft, rather lifeless, warmish Mexican water. But it
is pure.

Over the brink of the water-channel is the gully, and a noise--chock,
chock! I go to look. It is a woman, naked to the hips, standing washing
her other garments upon a stone. She has a beautiful full back, of a
deep orange colour, and her wet hair is divided and piled. In the water
a few yards up-stream two men are sitting naked, their brown-orange
giving off a glow in the shadow, also washing their clothes. Their
wet hair seems to steam blue-blackness. Just above them is a sort of
bridge, where the water divides, the channel-water taken from the
little river, and led along the top of the bank.

We sit under the wild guava tree in silence, and eat. The old woman
of the fruit, with naked breast and coffee-brown naked arms, her
under-garment fastened on one shoulder, round her waist an old striped
_sarape_ for a skirt, and on her head a blue _rebozo_ piled against the
sun, comes marching down the aqueduct with black bare feet, holding
three or four _chirimoyas_ to her bosom. _Chirimoyas_ are green
custard-apples.

She lectures us, in slow, heavy Spanish:

“This water, here, is for drinking. The other, below, is for washing.
This, you drink, and you don’t wash in it. The other, you wash in, and
you don’t drink it.” And she looked inquisitively at the bottle of
lemonade, cooling.

“Very good. We understand.”

Then she gave us the _chirimoyas_. I asked her to change the _peso_: I
had no change.

“No, Señor,” she said. “No, Señor. You don’t pay me. I bring you these,
and may you eat well. But the _chirimoyas_ are not ripe: in two or
three days they will be ripe. Now, they are not. In two or three days
they will be. Now, they are not. You can’t eat them yet. But I make a
gift of them to you, and may you eat well. Farewell. Remain with God.”

She marched impatiently off along the aqueduct.

Rosalino waited to catch my eye. Then he opened his mouth and showed
his pink tongue and swelled out his throat like a cobra, in a silent
laugh after the old woman.

“But,” he said in a low tone, “the _chirimoyas_ are not good ones.”

And again he swelled in the silent, delighted, derisive laugh.

He was right. When we came to eat them, three days later, the
custard-apples all had worms in them, and hardly any white meat.

“The old woman of Huayapa,” said Rosalino, reminiscent.

However, she had got the bottle. When we had drunk the lemonade,
we sent Rosalino to give her the empty wine-bottle, and she made
him another sententious little speech. But to her the bottle was a
treasure.

And I, going round the little hummock behind the wild guava tree, to
throw away the papers of the picnic, came upon a golden-brown young man
with his shirt just coming down over his head, but over no more of him.
Hastily retreating, I thought again what beautiful, suave, rich skins
these people have; a sort of richness of the flesh. It goes, perhaps,
with the complete absence of what we call “spirit.”

We lay still for a time, looking at the tiny guavas and the perfect,
soft, high blue sky overhead, where the hawks and the ragged-winged
_zopilotes_ sway and diminish. A long, hot way home. But _mañana es
otro dia_. To-morrow is another day. And even the next five minutes are
far enough away, in Mexico, on a Sunday afternoon.




THE MOZO




_The Mozo_


Rosalino really goes with the house, though he has been in service
here only two months. When we went to look at the place, we saw him
lurking in the _patio_, and glancing furtively under his brows. He is
not one of the erect, bantam little Indians that stare with a black,
incomprehensible, but somewhat defiant stare. It may be Rosalino has a
distant strain of other Indian blood, not Zapotec. Or it may be he is
only a bit different. The difference lies in a certain sensitiveness
and aloneness, as if he were a mother’s boy. The way he drops his head
and looks sideways under his black lashes, apprehensive, apprehending,
feeling his way, as it were. Not the bold male glare of most of the
Indians, who seem as if they had never, never had mothers at all.

The Aztec gods and goddesses are, as far as we have known anything
about them, an unlovely and unlovable lot. In their myths there is
no grace or charm, no poetry. Only this perpetual grudge, grudge,
grudging, one god grudging another, the gods grudging men their
existence, and men grudging the animals. The goddess of love is goddess
of dirt and prostitution, a dirt-eater, a horror, without a touch of
tenderness. If the god wants to make love to her, she has to sprawl
down in front of him, blatant and accessible.

And then, after all, when she conceives and brings forth, what is it
she produces? What is the infant-god she tenderly bears? Guess, all ye
people, joyful and triumphant!

You never could.

It is a stone knife.

It is a razor-edged knife of blackish-green flint, the knife of all
knives, the veritable Paraclete of knives. It is the sacrificial knife
with which the priest makes a gash in his victim’s breast, before he
tears out the heart, to hold it smoking to the sun. And the Sun, the
Sun behind the sun, is supposed to suck the smoking heart greedily with
insatiable appetite.

This, then, is a pretty Christmas Eve. Lo, the goddess is gone to
bed, to bring forth her child. Lo! ye people, await the birth of the
saviour, the wife of a god is about to become a mother.

_Tarumm-tarah! Tarumm-tarah!_ blow the trumpets. The child is born.
Unto us a son is given. Bring him forth, lay him on a tender cushion.
Show him, then, to all the people. See! See! See him upon the cushion,
tenderly new-born and reposing! Ah, _qué bonito_! Oh, what a nice,
blackish, smooth, keen stone knife!

And to this day, most of the Mexican Indian women seem to bring forth
stone knives. Look at them, these sons of incomprehensible mothers,
with their black eyes like flints, and their stiff little bodies as
taut and as keen as knives of obsidian. Take care they don’t rip you up.

Our Rosalino is an exception. He drops his shoulders just a little.
He is a bit bigger, also, than the average Indian down here. He must
be about five feet four inches. And he hasn’t got the big, obsidian,
glaring eyes. His eyes are smaller, blacker, like the quick black eyes
of the lizard. They don’t look at one with the obsidian stare. They are
just a bit aware that there is another being, unknown, at the other
end of the glance. Hence he drops his head with a little apprehension,
screening himself as if he were vulnerable.

Usually, these people have no correspondence with one at all. To them
a white man or white woman is a sort of phenomenon, just as a monkey is
a sort of phenomenon; something to watch, and wonder at, and laugh at,
but not to be taken on one’s own plane.

Now the white man is a sort of extraordinary white monkey that, by
cunning, has learnt lots of semi-magical secrets of the universe, and
made himself boss of the show. Imagine a race of big white monkeys got
up in fantastic clothes, and able to kill a man by hissing at him; able
to leap through the air in great hops, covering a mile in each leap;
able to transmit his thoughts by a moment’s effort of concentration to
some great white monkey or monkeyess, a thousand miles away: and you
have, from our point of view, something of the picture that the Indian
has of us.

The white monkey has curious tricks. He knows, for example, the time.
Now to a Mexican, and an Indian, time is a vague, foggy reality. There
are only three times: _en la mañana_, _en la tarde_, _en la noche_: in
the morning, in the afternoon, in the night. There is even no midday,
and no evening.

But to the white monkey, horrible to relate, there are exact spots of
time, such as five o’clock, half-past nine. The day is a horrible
puzzle of exact spots of time.

The same with distance: horrible invisible distances called two miles,
ten miles. To the Indians, there is near and far, and very near and
very far. There is two days or one day. But two miles are as good as
twenty to him, for he goes entirely by his feeling. If a certain two
miles feels far to him, then it _is_ far, it is _muy lejos_! But if a
certain twenty miles _feels_ near and familiar, then it is not far. Oh,
no, it is just a little distance. And he will let you set off in the
evening, for night to overtake you in the wilderness, without a qualm.
It is not far.

But the white man has a horrible, truly horrible, monkey-like passion
for invisible exactitudes. _Mañana_, to the native, may mean to-morrow,
three days hence, six months hence, and never. There are no fixed
points in life, save birth, and death, and the _fiestas_. The fixed
points of birth and death evaporate spontaneously into vagueness. And
the priests fix the _fiestas_. From time immemorial priests have fixed
the _fiestas_, the festivals of the gods, and men have had no more to
do with time. What should men have to do with time?

The same with money. These _centavos_ and these _pesos_, what do they
mean, after all? Little discs that have no charm. The natives insist
on reckoning in invisible coins, coins that don’t exist here, like
_reales_ or _pesetas_. If you buy two eggs for a _real_, you have to
pay twelve and a half _centavos_. Since also half a _centavo_ doesn’t
exist, you or the vendor forfeit the non-existent.

The same with honesty, the _meum_ and the _tuum_. The white man has a
horrible way of remembering, even to a _centavo_, even to a thimbleful
of _mescal_. Horrible! The Indian, it seems to me, is not naturally
dishonest. He is not naturally avaricious, has not even any innate
cupidity. In this he is unlike the old people of the Mediterranean,
to whom possessions have a mystic meaning, and a silver coin a mystic
white halo, a _lueur_ of magic.

To the real Mexican, no! He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even _like_
keeping money. His deep instinct is to spend it at once, so that he
needn’t have it. He doesn’t really want to keep anything, not even his
wife and children. Nothing that he has to be responsible for. Strip,
strip, strip away the past and the future, leave the naked moment of
the present disentangled. Strip away memory, strip away forethought
and care; leave the moment, stark and sharp and without consciousness,
like the obsidian knife. The before and the after are the stuff of
consciousness. The instant moment is forever keen with a razor-edge of
oblivion, like the knife of sacrifice.

But the great white monkey has got hold of the keys of the world, and
the black-eyed Mexican has to serve the great white monkey, in order
to live. He has to learn the tricks of the white monkey-show: time of
the day, coin of money, machines that start at a second, work that
is meaningless and yet is paid for with exactitude, in exact coin.
A whole existence of monkey-tricks and monkey-virtues. The strange
monkey-virtue of charity, the white monkeys nosing round to _help_, to
_save_! Could any trick be more unnatural? Yet it is one of the tricks
of the great white monkey.

If an Indian is poor, he says to another: I have no food; give me to
eat. Then the other hands the hungry one a couple of _tortillas_. That
is natural. But when the white monkeys come round, they peer at the
house, at the woman, at the children. They say: Your child is sick.
_Si, Señor._ What have you done for it?--_Nothing. What is to be
done?_--You must make a poultice. I will show you how.

Well, it was very amusing, this making hot dough to dab on the baby.
Like plastering a house with mud. But why do it twice? Twice is not
amusing. The child will die. Well, then, it will be in Paradise. How
nice for it! That’s just what God wants of it, that it shall be a
cheerful little angel among the roses of Paradise. What could be better?

How tedious of the white monkey coming with the trick of salvation,
to rub oil on the baby, and put poultices on it, and make you give it
medicine in a spoon at morning, noon, and night. Why morning and noon
and night? Why not just anytime, anywhen? It will die to-morrow if you
don’t do these things to-day! But to-morrow is another day, and it is
not dead now, so if it dies at another time, it must be because the
other times are out of hand.

Oh, the tedious, exacting white monkeys, with their yesterdays and
to-days and to-morrows! To-morrow is always another day, and yesterday
is part of the encircling never. Why think outside the moment? And
inside the moment one does not think. So why pretend to think? It is
one of the white-monkey tricks. He is a clever monkey. But he is ugly,
and he has nasty white flesh. We are not ugly, with screwed-up faces,
and we have good warm-brown flesh. If we have to work for the white
monkey, we don’t care. His tricks are half-amusing. And one may as well
amuse oneself that way as any other. So long as one is amused.

So long as the devil does not rouse in us, seeing the white monkeys
forever mechanically bossing, with their incessant tick-tack of work.
Seeing them get the work out of us, the sweat, the money, and then
taking the very land from us, the very oil and metal out of our soil.

They do it! They do it all the time. Because they can’t help it.
Because grasshoppers can but hop, and ants can carry little sticks,
and white monkeys can go tick-tack, tick-tack, do this, do that, time
to work, time to eat, time to drink, time to sleep, time to walk, time
to ride, time to wash, time to look dirty, tick-tack, tick-tack, time,
time, time, time! time! Oh, cut off his nose and make him swallow it.

For the _moment_ is as changeless as an obsidian knife, and the heart
of the Indian is keen as the moment that divides past from future, and
sacrifices them both.

To Rosalino, too, the white monkey-tricks are amusing. He is ready
to work for the white monkeys, to learn some of their tricks, their
monkey-speech of Spanish, their tick-tack ways. He works for four
_pesos_ a month, and his food: a few _tortillas_. Four _pesos_ are two
American dollars: about nine shillings. He owns two cotton shirts, two
pairs of calico pantaloons, two blouses, one of pink cotton, one of
darkish flannelette, and a pair of sandals. Also, his straw hat that
he has curled up to look very jaunty, and a rather old, factory-made,
rather cheap shawl, or plaid rug with fringe. _Et præterea nihil._

His duty is to rise in the morning and sweep the street in front
of the house, and water it. Then he sweeps and waters the broad,
brick-tiled verandahs, and flicks the chairs with a sort of duster made
of fluffy reeds. After which he walks behind the cook--she is very
superior, had a Spanish grandfather, and Rosalino must address her as
_Señora_--carrying the basket to market. Returned from the market, he
sweeps the whole of the _patio_, gathers up the leaves and refuse,
fills the pannier-basket, hitches it up on to his shoulders, and holds
it by a band across his forehead, and thus, a beast of burden, goes
out to deposit the garbage at the side of one of the little roads
leading out of the city. Every _little_ road leaves the town between
heaps of garbage, an avenue of garbage blistering in the sun.

Returning, Rosalino waters the whole of the garden and sprinkles the
whole of the _patio_. This takes most of the morning. In the afternoon,
he sits without much to do. If the wind has blown or the day was
hot, he starts again at about three o’clock, sweeping up leaves, and
sprinkling everywhere with an old watering-can.

Then he retreats to the entrance-way, the _zaguan_, which, with its big
doors and its cobbled track, is big enough to admit an ox-wagon. The
_zaguan_ is his home: just the doorway. In one corner is a low wooden
bench about four feet long and eighteen inches wide. On this he screws
up and sleeps, in his clothes as he is, wrapped in the old _sarape_.

But this is anticipating. In the obscurity of the _zaguan_ he sits and
pores, pores, pores over a school-book, learning to read and write. He
can read a bit, and write a bit. He filled a large sheet of foolscap
with writing: quite nice. But I found out that what he had written
was a Spanish poem, a love-poem, with _no puedo olvidar_ and _voy a
cortar_--the rose, of course. He had written the thing straight ahead,
without verse-lines or capitals or punctuation at all, just a vast
string of words, a whole foolscap sheet full. When I read a few lines
aloud, he writhed and laughed in an agony of confused feelings. And of
what he had written he understood a small, small amount, parrot-wise,
from the top of his head. Actually, it meant just words, sound, noise,
to him: noise called Castellano, Castilian. Exactly like a parrot.

From seven to eight he goes to the night-school, to cover a bit more
of the foolscap. He has been going for two years. If he goes two years
more he will perhaps really be able to read and write six intelligible
sentences: but only Spanish, which is as foreign to him as Hindustani
would be to an English farm-boy. Then if he can speak his quantum of
Spanish, and read it and write it to a very uncertain extent, he will
return to his village two days’ journey on foot into the hills, and
then, in time, he may even rise to be an _alcalde_, or headman of the
village, responsible to the Government. If he were _alcalde_ he would
get a little salary. But far more important to him is the glory: being
able to boss.

He has a _paisano_, a fellow-countryman, to sleep with him in the
_zaguan_, to guard the doors. Whoever gets into the house or _patio_
must get through these big doors. There is no other entrance, not even
a needle’s eye. The windows to the street are heavily barred. Each
house is its own small fortress. Ours is a double square, the trees
and flowers in the first square, with the two wings of the house. And
in the second _patio_, the chickens, pigeons, guinea-pigs, and the big
heavy earthenware dish or tub, called an _apaxtle_, in which all the
servants can bathe themselves, like chickens in a saucer.

By half-past nine at night Rosalino is lying on his little bench,
screwed up, wrapped in his shawl, his sandals, called _huaraches_, on
the floor. Usually he takes off his _huaraches_ when he goes to bed.
That is all his preparation. In another corner, wrapped up, head and
all, like a mummy in his thin old blanket, the _paisano_, another lad
of about twenty, lies asleep on the cold stones. And at an altitude of
five thousand feet, the nights can be cold.

Usually everybody is in by half-past nine in our very quiet house. If
not, you may thunder at the big doors. It is hard to wake Rosalino.
You have to go close to him, and call. That will wake him. But don’t
touch him. That would startle him terribly. No one is touched unawares,
except to be robbed or murdered.

“Rosalino! _estan tocando!_”--“Rosalino! they are knocking!”

At last there starts up a strange, glaring, utterly lost Rosalino.
Perhaps he just has enough wit to pull the door-catch. One wonders
where he was, and what he was, in his sleep, he starts up so strange
and wild and lost.

The first time he had anything to do for me was when the van was come
to carry the bit of furniture to the house. There was Aurelio, the
dwarf _mozo_ of our friends, and Rosalino, and the man who drove the
wagon. But there _should_ have been also a _cargador_--a porter. “Help
them,” said I to Rosalino. “You give a hand to help.” But he winced
away, muttering, “_No quiero!_--I don’t want to.”

The fellow, I thought to myself, is a fool. He thinks it’s not his job,
and perhaps he is afraid of smashing the furniture. Nothing to be done
but to leave him alone.

We settled in, and Rosalino seemed to like doing things for us. He
liked learning his monkey-tricks from the white monkeys. And since we
started feeding him from our own meals, and for the first time in his
life he had real soups, meat-stews, or a fried egg, he loved to do
things in the kitchen. He would come with sparkling black eyes: “_Hé
comido el caldo. Grazias!_” (“I have eaten the soup. Thank you.”)--And
he would give a strange, excited little yelp of a laugh.

Came the day when we walked to Huayapa, on the Sunday, and he was very
thrilled. But at night, in the evening when we got home, he lay mute
on his bench--not that he was really tired. The Indian gloom, which
settles on them like a black marsh-fog, had settled on him. He did not
bring in the water--let me carry it by myself.

Monday morning, the same black, reptilian gloom, and a sense of hatred.
He hated us. This was a bit flabbergasting, because he had been so
thrilled and happy the day before. But the revulsion had come. He
didn’t forgive himself for having felt free and happy with us. He had
eaten what we had eaten, hard-boiled eggs and sardine sandwiches and
cheese; he had drunk out of the orange-peel _taza_, which delighted him
so much. He had had a bottle of _gazoosa_, fizz, with us, on the way
home, in San Felipe.

And now, the reaction. The flint knife. He had been happy, _therefore_
we were scheming to take another advantage of him. We had some devilish
white-monkey trick up our sleeve; we wanted to get at his _soul_, no
doubt, and do it the white monkey’s damage. We wanted to get at his
heart, did we? But his heart was an obsidian knife.

He hated us, and gave off a black steam of hate, that filled the
_patio_ and made one feel sick. He did not come to the kitchen, he did
not carry the water. Leave him alone.

At lunch-time on Monday he said he wanted to leave. Why? He said he
wanted to go back to his village.

Very well. He was to wait just a few days, till another _mozo_ was
found.

At this a glance of pure, reptilian hate from his black eyes.

He sat motionless on his bench all the afternoon, in the Indian stupor
of gloom and profound hate. In the evening, he cheered up a little and
said he would stay on, at least till Easter.

Tuesday morning. More stupor and gloom and hate. He wanted to go back
to his village at once. All right! No one wanted to keep him against
his will. Another _mozo_ would be found at once.

He went off in the numb stupor of gloom and hate, a very potent hate
that could affect one in the pit of one’s stomach with nausea.

Tuesday afternoon, and he thought he would stay.

Wednesday morning, and he wanted to go.

Very good. Enquiries made; another _mozo_ was coming on Friday morning.
It was settled.

Thursday was _fiesta_. Wednesday, therefore, we would go to market,
the Niña--that is the mistress--myself, and Rosalino with the basket.
He loved to go to market with the _patrones_. We would give him money
and send him off to bargain for oranges, _pitahayas_, potatoes, eggs,
a chicken, and so forth. This he simply loved to do. It put him into a
temper to see us buying without bargaining, and paying ghastly prices.

He bargained away, silent almost, muttering darkly. It took him a long
time, but he had far greater success than even Natividad, the cook. And
he came back in triumph, with much stuff and little money spent.

So again that afternoon, he was staying on. The spell was wearing off.

The Indians of the hills have a heavy, intense sort of attachment to
their villages; Rosalino had not been out of the little city for two
years. Suddenly finding himself in Huayapa, a real Indian hill-village,
the black Indian gloom of nostalgia must have made a crack in his
spirits. But he had been perfectly cheerful--perhaps too cheerful--till
we got home.

Again, the Señorita had taken a photograph of him. They are all crazy
to have their photographs taken. I had given him an envelope and a
stamp, to send a photograph to his mother. Because in his village he
had a widow mother, a brother, and a married sister. The family owned
a bit of land, with orange-trees. The best oranges come from the
hills, where it is cooler. Seeing the photograph, the mother, who had
completely forgotten her son, as far as any keen remembering goes,
suddenly, like a cracker going off inside her, wanted him: at that very
moment. So she sent an urgent message.

But already it was Wednesday afternoon. Arrived a little fellow in
white clothes, smiling hard. It was the brother from the hills. Now,
we thought, Rosalino will have someone to walk back with. On Friday,
after the _fiesta_, he would go.

Thursday, he escorted us with the basket to the _fiesta_. He bargained
for flowers, and for a _sarape_ which he didn’t get, for a carved
_jicara_ which he did get, and for a number of toys. He and the Niña
and the Señorita ate a great wafer of a pancake with sweet stuff on it.
The basket grew heavy. The brother appeared, to carry the hen and the
extra things. Bliss.

He was perfectly happy again. He didn’t want to go on Friday; he didn’t
want to go at all. He wanted to stay with us and come with us to
England when we went home.

So, another trip to the friend, the Mexican, who had found us the other
_mozo_. Now to put off the other boy again: but then, they are like
that.

And the Mexican, who had known Rosalino when he first came down from
the hills and could speak no Spanish, told us another thing about him.

In the last revolution--a year ago--the revolutionaries of the winning
side wanted more soldiers from the hills. The _alcalde_ of the
hill-village was told to pick out young men and send them down to the
barracks in the city. Rosalino was among the chosen.

But Rosalino refused, said again _No quiero!_ He is one of those, like
myself, who have a horror of serving in a mass of men, or even of being
mixed up with a mass of men. He obstinately refused. Whereupon the
recruiting soldiers beat him with the butt of their rifles till he lay
unconscious, apparently dead.

Then, because they wanted him at once, and he would now be no good for
some time, with his injured back, they left him, to get the revolution
over without him.

This explains his fear of furniture-carrying, and his fear of being
“caught.”

Yet that little Aurelio, the friend’s _mozo_, who is not above four
feet six in height, a tiny fellow, fared even worse. He, too, is from
the hills. In his village, a cousin of his gave some information to the
_losing_ side in the revolution. The cousin wisely disappeared.

But in the city, the winning side seized Aurelio, since he was the
_cousin_ of the delinquent. In spite of the fact that he was the
faithful _mozo_ of a foreign resident, he was flung into prison.
Prisoners in prison are not fed. Either friends or relatives bring
them food, or they go very, very thin. Aurelio had a married sister
in town, but _she_ was afraid to go to the prison, lest she and her
husband should be seized. The master, then, sent his new _mozo_ twice a
day to the prison with a basket; the huge, huge prison, for this little
town of a few thousands.

Meanwhile the master struggled and struggled with the
“authorities”--friends of the people--for Aurelio’s release. Nothing to
be done.

One day the new _mozo_ arrived at the prison with the basket, to find
no Aurelio. A friendly soldier gave the message Aurelio had left.
“Adios a mi patron. Me llevan.” Oh, fatal words: “_Me llevan_”--They
are taking me off. The master rushed to the train: it had gone, with
the dwarf, plucky little _mozo_, into the void.

Months later, Aurelio reappeared. He was in rags, haggard, and his
dark throat was swoollen up to the ears. He had been taken off, two
hundred miles into Vera Cruz State. He had been hung up by the neck,
with a fixed knot, and left hanging for hours. Why? To make the cousin
come and save his relative: put his own neck into a running noose. To
make the absolutely innocent fellow confess: what? Everybody knew he
was innocent. At any rate, to teach everybody better next time. Oh,
brotherly teaching!

Aurelio escaped, and took to the mountains. Sturdy little dwarf of a
fellow, he made his way back, begging _tortillas_ at the villages,
and arrived, haggard, with a great swoollen neck, to find his master
waiting, and another “party” in power. More friends of the people.

To-morrow is another day. The master nursed Aurelio well, and Aurelio
is a strong, if tiny, fellow, with big, brilliant black eyes that for
the moment will trust a foreigner, but none of his own people. A dwarf
in stature, but perfectly made, and very strong. And very intelligent,
far more quick and intelligent than Rosalino.

Is it any wonder that Aurelio and Rosalino, when they see the soldiers
with guns on their shoulders marching towards the prison with some
blanched prisoner between them--and one sees it every few days--stand
and gaze in a blank kind of horror, and look at the _patron_, to see if
there is any refuge?

Not to be _caught_! Not to be _caught_! It must have been the
prevailing motive of Indian-Mexico life since long before Montezuma
marched his prisoners to sacrifice.




MARKET DAY




_Market Day_


This is the last Saturday before Christmas. The next year will be
momentous, one feels. This year is nearly gone. Dawn was windy, shaking
the leaves, and the rising sun shone under a gap of yellow cloud. But
at once it touched the yellow flowers that rise above the _patio_ wall,
and the swaying, glowing magenta of the bougainvillea, and the fierce
red outbursts of the poinsettia. The poinsettia is very splendid, the
flowers very big, and of a sure stainless red. They call them Noche
Buenas, flowers of Christmas Eve. These tufts throw out their scarlet
sharply, like red birds ruffling in the wind of dawn as if going
to bathe, all their feathers alert. This for Christmas, instead of
holly-berries. Christmas seems to need a red herald.

The yucca is tall, higher than the house. It is, too, in flower,
hanging an arm’s-length of soft creamy bells, like a yard-long
grape-cluster of foam. And the waxy bells break on their stems in the
wind, fall noiselessly from the long creamy bunch, that hardly sways.

The coffee-berries are turning red. The hibiscus flowers,
rose-coloured, sway at the tips of the thin branches, in rosettes of
soft red.

In the second _patio_, there is a tall tree of the flimsy acacia sort.
Above itself it puts up whitish fingers of flowers, naked on the blue
sky. And in the wind these fingers of flowers in the bare blue sky,
sway, sway with the reeling, roundward motion of tree-tips in a wind.

A restless morning, with clouds lower down, moving also with a larger
roundward motion. Everything moving. Best to go out in motion too, the
slow roundward motion like the hawks.

Everything seems slowly to circle and hover towards a central point,
the clouds, the mountains round the valley, the dust that rises,
the big, beautiful, white-barred hawks, _gabilanes_, and even the
snow-white flakes of flowers upon the dim _palo-blanco_ tree. Even the
organ cactus, rising in stock-straight clumps, and the candelabrum
cactus, seem to be slowly wheeling and pivoting upon a centre, close
upon it.

Strange that we should think in straight lines, when there are none,
and talk of straight courses, when every course, sooner or later, is
seen to be making the sweep round, swooping upon the centre. When space
is curved, and the cosmos is sphere within sphere, and the way from any
one point to any other point is round the bend of the inevitable, that
turns as the tips of the broad wings of the hawk turn upwards, leaning
upon the air like the invisible half of the ellipse. If I have a way to
go, it will be round the swoop of a bend impinging centripetal towards
the centre. The straight course is hacked out in wounds, against the
will of the world.

Yet the dust advances like a ghost along the road, down the valley
plain. The dry turf of the valley-bed gleams like soft skin, sunlit and
pinkish ochre, spreading wide between the mountains that seem to emit
their own darkness, a dark-blue vapor translucent, sombring them from
the humped crests downwards. The many-pleated, noiseless mountains of
Mexico.

And away on the footslope lie the white specks of Huayapa, among its
lake of trees. It is Saturday, and the white dots of men are threading
down the trail over the bare humps to the plain, following the dark
twinkle-movement of asses, the dark nodding of the woman’s head as she
rides between the baskets. Saturday and market-day, and morning, so the
white specks of men, like sea-gulls on plough-land, come ebbing like
sparks from the _palo-blanco_, over the fawn undulating of the valley
slope.

They are dressed in snow-white cotton, and they lift their knees in the
Indian trot, following the ass where the woman sits perched between the
huge baskets, her child tight in the _rebozo_, at the brown breast.
And girls in long, full, soiled cotton skirts running, trotting,
ebbing along after the twinkle-movement of the ass. Down they come
in families, in clusters, in solitary ones, threading with ebbing,
running, barefoot movement noiseless towards the town, that blows the
bubbles of its church-domes above the stagnant green of trees, away
under the opposite fawn-skin hills.

But down the valley middle comes the big road, almost straight. You
will know it by the tall walking of the dust, that hastens also towards
the town, overtaking, overpassing everybody. Overpassing all the dark
little figures and the white specks that thread tinily, in a sort of
underworld, to the town.

From the valley villages and from the mountains the peasants and the
Indians are coming in with supplies, the road is like a pilgrimage,
with the dust in greatest haste, dashing for town. Dark-eared asses
and running men, running women, running girls, running lads, twinkling
donkeys ambling on fine little feet, under twin great baskets with
tomatoes and gourds, twin great nets of bubble-shaped jars, twin
bundles of neat-cut faggots of wood, neat as bunches of cigarettes, and
twin net-sacks of charcoal. Donkeys, mules, on they come, great pannier
baskets making a rhythm under the perched woman, great bundles bouncing
against the sides of the slim-footed animals. A baby donkey trotting
naked after its piled-up dam, a white, sandal-footed man following with
the silent Indian haste, and a girl running again on light feet.

Onwards, on a strange current of haste. And slowly rowing among
the foot-travel, the ox-wagons rolling solid wheels below the high
net of the body. Slow oxen, with heads pressed down nosing to the
earth, swaying, swaying their great horns as a snake sways itself,
the shovel-shaped collar of solid wood pressing down on their necks
like a scoop. On, on between the burnt-up turf and the solid,
monumental green of the organ cactus. Past the rocks and the floating
_palo-blanco_ flowers, past the towsled dust of the _mesquite_ bushes.
While the dust once more, in a greater haste than anyone, comes tall
and rapid down the road, overpowering and obscuring all the little
people, as in a cataclysm.

They are mostly small people, of the Zapotec race: small men with
lifted chests and quick, lifted knees, advancing with heavy energy
in the midst of dust. And quiet, small, round-headed women running
barefoot, tightening their blue _rebozos_ round their shoulders, so
often with a baby in the fold. The white cotton clothes of the men so
white that their faces are invisible places of darkness under their
big hats. Clothed darkness, faces of night, quickly, silently, with
inexhaustible energy advancing to the town.

And many of the serranos, the Indians from the hills, wearing their
little conical black felt hats, seem capped with night, above the
straight white shoulders. Some have come far, walking all yesterday in
their little black hats and black-sheathed sandals. To-morrow they will
walk back. And their eyes will be just the same, black and bright and
wild, in the dark faces. They have no goal, any more than the hawks in
the air, and no course to run, any more than the clouds.

The market is a huge roofed-in place. Most extraordinary is the noise
that comes out, as you pass along the adjacent street. It is a huge
noise, yet you may never notice it. It sounds as if all the ghosts in
the world were talking to one another, in ghost-voices, within the
darkness of the market structure. It is a noise something like rain,
or banana leaves in a wind. The market, full of Indians, dark-faced,
silent-footed, hush-spoken, but pressing in in countless numbers. The
queer hissing murmurs of the Zapotec _idioma_, among the sounds of
Spanish, the quiet, aside-voices of the Mixtecas.

To buy and to sell, but above all, to commingle. In the old world, men
make themselves two great excuses for coming together to a centre, and
commingling freely in a mixed, unsuspicious host. Market and religion.
These alone bring men, unarmed, together since time began. A little
load of firewood, a woven blanket, a few eggs and tomatoes are excuse
enough for men, women, and children to cross the foot-weary miles
of valley and mountain. To buy, to sell, to barter, to exchange. To
exchange, above all things, human contact.

That is why they like you to bargain, even if it’s only the difference
of a centavo. Round the centre of the covered market, where there
is a basin of water, are the flowers: red, white, pink roses in
heaps, many-coloured little carnations, poppies, bits of larkspur,
lemon and orange marigolds, buds of madonna lilies, pansies, a few
forget-me-nots. They don’t bring the tropical flowers. Only the lilies
come wild from the hills, and the mauve red orchids.

“How much this bunch of cherry-pie heliotrope?”

“Fifteen centavos.”

“Ten.”

“Fifteen.”

You put back the cherry-pie, and depart. But the woman is quite
content. The contact, so short even, brisked her up.

“Pinks?”

“The red ones, Señorita? Thirty centavos.”

“No. I don’t want red ones. The mixed.”

“Ah!” The woman seizes a handful of little carnations of all colours,
carefully puts them together. “Look, Señorita! No more?”

“No, no more. How much?”

“The same. Thirty centavos.”

“It is much.”

“No, Señorita, it is not much. Look at this little bunch. It is eight
centavos.”--Displays a scrappy little bunch. “Come then, twenty-five.”

“No! Twenty-two.”

“Look!” She gathers up three or four more flowers, and claps them to
the bunch. “Two _reales_, Señorita.”

It is a bargain. Off you go with multicoloured pinks, and the woman has
had one more moment of contact, with a stranger, a perfect stranger. An
intermingling of voices, a threading together of different wills. It is
life. The centavos are an excuse.

The stalls go off in straight lines, to the right, brilliant
vegetables, to the left, bread and sweet buns. Away at the one end,
cheese, butter, eggs, chickens, turkeys, meat. At the other, the
native-woven blankets and _rebozos_, skirts, shirts, handkerchiefs.
Down the far-side, sandals and leather things.

The _sarape_ men spy you, and whistle to you like ferocious birds,
and call “Señor! Señor! Look!” Then with violence one flings open a
dazzling blanket, while another whistles more ear-piercingly still, to
make you look at _his_ blanket. It is the veritable den of lions and
tigers, that spot where the _sarape_ men have their blankets piled on
the ground. You shake your head, and flee.

To find yourself in the leather avenue.

“Señor! Señor! Look! Huaraches! Very fine, very finely made! Look,
Señor!”

The fat leather man jumps up and holds a pair of sandals at one’s
breast. They are of narrow woven strips of leather, in the newest Paris
style, but a style ancient to these natives. You take them in your
hand, and look at them quizzically, while the fat wife of the huarache
man reiterates, “Very fine work. Very fine. Much work!”

Leather men usually seem to have their wives with them.

“How much?”

“Twenty _reales_.”

“Twenty!”--in a voice of surprise and pained indignation.

“How much do you give?”

You refuse to answer. Instead you put the huaraches to your nose. The
huarache man looks at his wife, and they laugh aloud.

“They smell,” you say.

“No, Señor, they don’t smell!”--and the two go off into fits of
laughter.

“Yes, they smell. It is not American leather.”

“Yes, Señor, it is American leather. They don’t smell, Señor. No, they
don’t smell.” He coaxes you till you wouldn’t believe your own nose.

“Yes, they smell.”

“How much do you give?”

“Nothing, because they smell.”

And you give another sniff, though it is painfully unnecessary. And in
spite of your refusal to bid, the man and wife go into fits of laughter
to see you painfully sniffing.

You lay down the sandals and shake your head.

“How much do you offer?” reiterates the man, gaily.

You shake your head mournfully, and move away. The leather man and
his wife look at one another and go off into another fit of laughter,
because you smelt the huaraches, and said they stank.

They did. The natives use human excrement for tanning leather. When
Bernal Diaz came with Cortes to the great market-place of Mexico
City, in Montezuma’s day, he saw the little pots of human excrement
in rows for sale, and the leather-makers going round sniffing to
see which was the best, before they paid for it. It staggered even
a fifteenth-century Spaniard. Yet my leather man and his wife think
it screamingly funny that I smell the huaraches before buying them.
Everything has its own smell, and the natural smell of huaraches is
what it is. You might as well quarrel with an onion for smelling like
an onion.

The great press of the quiet natives, some of them bright and clean,
many in old rags, the brown flesh showing through the rents in the
dirty cotton. Many wild hillmen, in their little hats of conical
black felt, with their wild, staring eyes. And as they cluster
round the hat-stall, in a long, long suspense of indecision before
they can commit themselves, trying on a new hat, their black hair
gleams blue-black, and falls thick and rich over their foreheads,
like gleaming bluey-black feathers. And one is reminded again of the
blue-haired Buddha, with the lotus at his navel.

But already the fleas are travelling under one’s clothing.

Market lasts all day. The native inns are great dreary yards with
little sheds, and little rooms around. Some men and families who have
come from far, will sleep in one or other of the little stall-like
rooms. Many will sleep on the stones, on the earth, round the market,
anywhere. But the asses are there by the hundred, crowded in the
inn-yards, drooping their ears with the eternal patience of the beast
that knows better than any other beast that every road curves round to
the same centre of rest, and hither and thither means nothing.

And towards nightfall the dusty road will be thronged with shadowy
people and unladen asses and new-laden mules, urging silently into the
country again, their backs to the town, glad to get away from the town,
to see the cactus and the pleated hills, and the trees that mean a
village. In some village they will lie under a tree, or under a wall,
and sleep. Then the next day, home.

It is fulfilled, what they came to market for. They have sold and
bought. But more than that, they have had their moment of contact and
centripetal flow. They have been part of a great stream of men flowing
to a centre, to the vortex of the market-place. And here they have felt
life concentrate upon them, they have been jammed between the soft
hot bodies of strange men come from afar, they have had the sound of
stranger’s voices in their ears, they have asked and been answered in
unaccustomed ways.

There is no goal, and no abiding-place, and nothing is fixed, not even
the cathedral towers. The cathedral towers are slowly leaning, seeking
the curve of return. As the natives curved in a strong swirl, towards
the vortex of the market. Then on a strong swerve of repulsion, curved
out and away again, into space.

Nothing but the touch, the spark of contact. That, no more. That, which
is most elusive, still the only treasure. Come, and gone, and yet the
clue itself.

True, folded up in the handkerchief inside the shirt, are the copper
centavos, and maybe a few silver pesos. But these too will disappear
as the stars disappear at daybreak, as they are meant to disappear.
Everything is meant to disappear. Every curve plunges into the vortex
and is lost, re-emerges with a certain relief and takes to the open,
and there is lost again.

Only that which is utterly intangible, matters. The contact, the spark
of exchange. That which can never be fastened upon, forever gone,
forever coming, never to be detained: the spark of contact.

Like the evening star, when it is neither night nor day. Like the
evening star, between the sun and the moon, and swayed by neither of
them. The flashing intermediary, the evening star that is seen only
at the dividing of the day and night, but then is more wonderful than
either.




INDIANS AND ENTERTAINMENT




_Indians and Entertainment_


We go to the theatre to be entertained. It may be _The Potters_, it may
be Max Reinhardt, _King Lear_, or _Electra_. All entertainment.

We want to be taken out of ourselves. Or not entirely that. We want to
become spectators at our own show. We lean down from the plush seats
like little gods in a democratic heaven, and see ourselves away below
there, on the world of the stage, in a brilliant artificial sunlight,
behaving comically absurdly, like Pa Potter, yet getting away with it,
or behaving tragically absurdly, like King Lear, and not getting away
with it: rather proud of not getting away with it.

We see ourselves: we survey ourselves: we laugh at ourselves: we weep
over ourselves: we are the gods above of our own destinies. Which is
very entertaining.

The secret of it all, is that we detach ourselves from the painful and
always solid trammels of actual existence, and become creatures of
memory and of spirit-like consciousness. We are the gods and there’s
the machine, down below us. Down below, on the stage, our mechanical or
earth-bound self stutters or raves, Pa Potter or King Lear. But however
Potterish or Learian we may be, while we sit aloft in plush seats we
are creatures of pure consciousness, pure spirit, surveying those
selves of clay who are so absurd or so tragic, below.

Even a little girl trailing a long skirt and playing at being Mrs.
Paradiso next door, is enjoying the same sensation. From her childish
little consciousness she is making Mrs. Paradiso, creating her
according to her own fancy. It is the little individual consciousness
lording it, for the moment, over the actually tiresome and inflexible
world of actuality. Mrs. Paradiso in the flesh is a thing to fear. But
if I can play at being Mrs. Paradiso, why, then I am a little Lord
Almighty, and Mrs. Paradiso is but a creation from my consciousness.

The audience in the theatre is a little democracy of the ideal
consciousness. They all sit there, gods of the ideal mind, and survey
with laughter or tears the realm of actuality.

Which is very soothing and satisfying so long as you believe that the
ideal mind is the actual arbiter. So long as you instinctively feel
that there is some supreme, universal Ideal Consciousness swaying all
destiny.

When you begin to have misgivings, you sit rather uneasily on your
plush seat.

Nobody really believes that destiny is an accident. The very fact that
day keeps on following night, and summer winter, establishes the belief
in universal law, and from this to a belief in some great hidden mind
in the universe is an inevitable step for us.

A few people, the so-called advanced, have grown uneasy in their bones
about the Universal Mind. But the mass are absolutely convinced. And
every member of the mass is absolutely convinced that he is part and
parcel of this Universal Mind. Hence his joy at the theatre. His even
greater joy at the cinematograph.

In the moving pictures he has detached himself even further from
the solid stuff of earth. There, the people are truly shadows: the
shadow-pictures are thinkings of his mind. They live in the rapid and
kaleidoscopic realm of the abstract. And the individual watching the
shadow-spectacle sits a very god, in an orgy of abstraction, actually
dissolved into delighted, watchful spirit. And if his best girl sits
beside him, she vibrates in the same ether, and triumphs in the same
orgy of abstraction. No wonder this passion of dramatic abstraction
becomes a lust.

That is our idea of entertainment.

You come to the Indian and ask him about his. He hasn’t got one.

The Indians dance around the drum, singing. They have their great
spectacular dances, Eagle dance, Corn dance. They have the dancing,
singing procession between the fires at Christmas. They have their
sacred races, down the long track.

White people always, or nearly always, write sentimentally about the
Indians. Even a man like Adolf Bandelier. He was not a sentimental man.
On the contrary. Yet the sentimentality creeps in, when he writes about
the thing he knows best, the Indian.

So it is with all of them, anthropologists and myth-transcribers and
all. There is that creeping note of sentimentality through it all,
which makes one shrug one’s shoulders and wish the Indians to hell,
along with a lot of other bunk.

You’ve got to de-bunk the Indian, as you’ve got to de-bunk the Cowboy.
When you’ve de-bunked the Cowboy, there’s not much left. But the Indian
bunk is not the Indian’s invention. It is ours.

It is almost impossible for the white people to approach the Indian
without either sentimentality or dislike. The common healthy vulgar
white usually feels a certain native dislike of these drumming
aboriginals. The highbrow invariably lapses into sentimentalism like
the smell of bad eggs.

Why?--Both the reactions are due to the same feeling in the white man.
The Indian is not in line with us. He’s not coming our way. His whole
being is going a different way from ours. And the minute you set eyes
on him you know it.

And then, there’s only two things you can do. You can detest the
insidious devil for having an utterly different way from our own great
way. Or you can perform the mental trick, and fool yourself and others
into believing that the befeathered and bedaubed darling is nearer to
the true ideal gods than we are.

This last is just bunk, and a lie. But it saves our appearances. The
former feeling, of instinctive but tolerant repulsion, the feeling of
most ordinary farmers and ranchers and mere individuals in the west,
is quite natural, it is only honesty to admit it.

The Indian way of consciousness is different from and fatal to our way
of consciousness. Our way of consciousness is different from and fatal
to the Indian. The two ways, the two streams are never to be united.
They are not even to be reconciled. There is no bridge, no canal of
connection.

The sooner we realize, and accept this, the better, and leave off
trying, with fulsome sentimentalism, to render the Indian in our own
terms.

The acceptance of the great paradox of human consciousness is the first
step to a new accomplishment.

The consciousness of one branch of humanity is the annihilation of the
consciousness of another branch. That is, the life of the Indian, his
stream of conscious being, is just death to the white man. And we can
understand the consciousness of the Indian only in terms of the death
of our consciousness.

And let not this be turned into another sentimentalism. Because
the same paradox exists between the consciousness of white men and
Hindoos or Polynesians or Bantu. It is the eternal paradox of human
consciousness. To pretend that all is one stream is to cause chaos and
nullity. To pretend to express one stream in terms of another, so as to
identify the two, is false and sentimental. The only thing you can do
is to have a little Ghost inside you which sees both ways, or even many
ways. But a man cannot _belong_ to both ways, or to many ways. One man
can belong to one great way of consciousness only. He may even change
from one way to another. But he cannot go both ways at once. Can’t be
done.

So that, to understand the Indian conception of entertainment, we have
to destroy our own conception.

Perhaps the commonest entertainment among the Indians is singing round
the drum, at evening, when the day is over. European peasants will sit
round the fire and sing. But they sing ballads or lyrics, tales about
individuals or individual, personal experience. And each individual
identifies the emotion of the song with his own emotion.

Or the wild fishermen of the Outer Hebrides will sing in their intense,
concentrated way, by the fire. And again, usually, the songs have
words. Yet sometimes not. Sometimes the song has merely sounds, and a
marvellous melody. It is the seal drifting in to shore on the wave, or
the seal-woman, singing low and secret, departing back from the shores
of men, through the surf, back to the realm of the outer beasts that
rock on the waters and stare through glistening, vivid, mindless eyes.

This is approaching the Indian song. But even this is pictorial,
conceptual far beyond the Indian point. The Hebridean still sees
himself human, and _outside_ the great naturalistic influences, which
are the dramatic circumstances of his life.

The Indian, singing, sings without words or vision. Face lifted and
sightless, eyes half closed and visionless, mouth open and speechless,
the sounds arise in his chest, from the consciousness in the abdomen.
He will tell you it is a song of a man coming home from the bear-hunt:
or a song to make rain: or a song to make the corn grow: or even, quite
modern, the song of the church bell on Sunday morning.

But the man coming home from the bear-hunt is any man, all men, the
bear is any bear, every bear, all bear. There is no individual,
isolated experience. It is the hunting, tired, triumphant demon of
manhood which has won against the squint-eyed demon of all bears. The
experience is generic, non-individual. It is an experience of the human
blood-stream, not of the mind or spirit. Hence the subtle incessant,
insistent rhythm of the drum, which is pulsated like the heart, and
soulless, and unescapable. Hence the strange blind unanimity of the
Indian men’s voices. The experience is one experience, tribal, of the
blood-stream. Hence, to our ears, the absence of melody. Melody is
individualized emotion, just as orchestral music is the harmonizing
again of many separate, individual emotions or experiences. But the
real Indian song is non-individual, and without melody. Strange,
clapping, crowing, gurgling sounds, in an unseizable subtle rhythm, the
rhythm of the heart in her throes: from a parted entranced mouth, from
a chest powerful and free, from an abdomen where the great blood-stream
surges in the dark, and surges in its own generic experiences.

This may mean nothing to you. To the ordinary white ear, the Indian’s
singing is a rather disagreeable howling of dogs to a tom-tom. But if
it rouses no other sensation, it rouses a touch of fear amid hostility.
Whatever the spirit of man may be, the blood is basic.

Or take the song to make the corn grow. The dark faces stoop forward,
in a strange race darkness. The eyelashes droop a little in the dark,
ageless, vulnerable faces. The drum is a heart beating with insistent
thuds. And the spirits of the men go out on the ether, vibrating in
waves from the hot, dark, intentional blood, seeking the creative
presence that hovers forever in the ether, seeking the identification,
following on down the mysterious rhythms of the creative pulse, on and
on into the germinating quick of the maize that lies under the ground,
there, with the throbbing, pulsing, clapping rhythm that comes from
the dark, creative blood in man, to stimulate the tremulous, pulsating
protoplasm in the seed-germ, till it throws forth its rhythms of
creative energy into rising blades of leaf and stem.

Or take the round dances, round the drum. These may or may not have
a name. The dance, anyhow, is primarily a song. All the men sing in
unison, as they move with the soft, yet heavy bird-tread which is
the whole of the dance. There is no drama. With bodies bent a little
forward, shoulders and breasts loose and heavy, feet powerful but soft,
the men tread the rhythm into the centre of the earth. The drums keep
up the pulsating heart-beat. The men sing in unison, though some will
be silent for moments, or even minutes. And for hours, hours it goes
on: the round dance.

It has no name. It has no words. It means nothing at all. There is no
spectacle, no spectator.

Yet perhaps it is the most stirring sight in the world, in the dark,
near the fire, with the drums going, the pine-trees standing still, the
everlasting darkness, and the strange lifting and dropping, surging,
crowing, gurgling, aah--h--h--ing! of the male voices.

What are they doing? Who knows? But perhaps they are giving themselves
again to the pulsing, incalculable fall of the blood, which forever
seeks to fall to the centre of the earth, while the heart, like a
planet pulsating in an orbit, keeps up the strange, lonely circulating
of the separate human existence.

But what we seek, passively, in sleep, they perhaps seek actively, in
the round dance. It is the homeward pulling of the blood, as the feet
fall in the soft, heavy rhythm, endlessly. It is the dark blood falling
back from the mind, from sight and speech and knowing, back to the
great central source where is rest and unspeakable renewal. We whites,
creatures of spirit, look upon sleep and see only the dreams that lie
as debris of the day, mere bits of wreckage from day-consciousness.
We never realize the strange falling back of the dark blood into the
downward rhythm, the rhythm of pure forgetting and pure renewal.

Or take the little dances round the fire, the mime dances, when two
men put on the eagle feathers and take the shield on their arm, and
dance the pantomime of a fight, a spear dance. The rhythm is the same,
really, the drums keep up the heart-pulsation, the feet the peculiar
bird-tread, the soft, heavy, bird-like step that treads as it were
towards the centre of the earth. But there is also the subtle leaping
towards each other of the two shield-sheltered naked ones, feathered
with the power of the eagle. The leaping together, the coming close,
the circling, wary, stealthy avoidance and retreat, always on the same
rhythm of drum-beats, the same regular, heavy-soft tread of moccasined
feet. It is the dance of the naked blood-being, defending his own
isolation in the rhythm of the universe. Not skill nor prowess, not
heroism. Not man to man. The creature of the isolated, circulating
blood-stream dancing in the peril of his own isolation, in the
overweening of his own singleness. The glory in power of the man of
single existence. The peril of the man whose heart is suspended, like
a single red star, in a great and complex universe, following its own
lone course round the invisible sun of our own being, amid the strange
wandering array of other hearts.

The other men look on. They may or may not sing. And they see
themselves in the power and peril of the lonely heart, the creature of
the isolated blood-circuit. They see also, subsidiary, the skill, the
agility, the swiftness, the daunting onrush that make the warrior. It
is practice as well as mystery.

Or take the big, spectacular dances, like the deer dance, the corn
dance. The deer dance in the New Year. The people crowded on the roofs
of the pueblo: women, children, old men, watching. The two lines of
men, hunters, facing one another. And away at the stream which comes
running swiftly from among the cotton-wood trees, the watchers,
watching eagerly. At last, over the log bridge, two maidens leading the
animals: two maidens in their black shawls and wide white deer-skin
top-boots, dancing with a slow, delicate-footed rhythm, facing out,
then facing in, and shaking their gourd rattles delicately, marking the
rhythm as the drums mark it. Following the maidens, all the animals:
men in two columns, and each man an animal, leaning forward each on two
slim sticks which are his forelegs, with the deer-skin over him, the
antlers branching from his head: or the buffalo hide, from whose shaggy
mane his bent head peers out: or a black bear, or a wolf. There they
come, the two long lines of wild animals: deer, buffalo, bear, wolf,
coyote, and at the back, even tiny boys, as foxes, all stepping on
those soft, pointed toes, and moving in slow silence under the winter
sun, following the slow, swinging progress of the dancing maidens.

Everything is very soft, subtle, delicate. There is none of the
hardness of representation. They are not representing something, not
even playing. It is a soft, subtle _being_ something.

Yet at the same time it is a game, and a very dramatic naive spectacle.
The old men trot softly alongside, laughing, showing all their
wrinkles. But they are experiencing a delicate, wild inward delight,
participating in the natural mysteries. They tease the little boys
under the fox-skins, and the boys, peeping with their round black eyes,
are shy and confused. Yet they keep on in the procession, solemnly,
as it moves between the ranks of the wild hunters. And all eyes are
round with wonder, and the mystery of participation. Amused, too, on
the merely human side of themselves. The gay touch of amusement in
buffoonery does not in the least detract from the delicate, pulsing
wonder of solemnity, which comes from participating in the ceremony
itself.

There you have it all, the pantomime, the buffoonery, the human
comicalness. But at the same time, quivering bright and wide-eyed
in unchangeable delight of solemnity, you have the participating in
a natural wonder. The mystery of the wild creatures led from their
fastnesses, their wintry retreats and holes in the ground, docilely
fascinated by the delicacy and the commanding wistfulness of the
maidens who went out to seek them, to seek food in the winter, and who
draw after them, in a following, the wild, the timid, the rapacious
animals, following in gentle wonder of bewitchment, right into the
haunts of men, right into the camp and up to the hunters. The two long
lines of wild animals delicately and slowly stepping behind the slow
gyration of the two dark-fringed maidens, who shake their gourd rattles
in a delicate, quick, three-pulsed rhythm, and never change their wide
dark eyes, under the dark fringe. It is the celebration of another
triumph, the triumph of the magical wistfulness of women, the wonderful
power of her seeking, her yearning, which can draw forth even the bear
from his den.

Drama, we are told, has developed out of these ceremonial dances. Greek
drama arose this way.

But from the Indian’s ceremonial dance to the Greek’s early religious
ceremony is still a long step. The Greeks usually had some specified
deity, some particular god to whom the ceremony was offered. And this
god is the witness, the essential audience of the play. The ceremony
is _performed_ for the gratification of the god. And here you have the
beginning of the theatre, with players and audience.

With the Indians it is different. There is strictly no god. The Indian
does not consider himself as created, and therefore external to God, or
the creature of God. To the Indian there is no conception of a defined
God. Creation is a great flood, forever flowing, in lovely and terrible
waves. In everything, the shimmer of creation, and never the finality
of the created. Never the distinction between God and God’s creation,
or between Spirit and Matter. Everything, everything is the wonderful
shimmer of creation, it may be a deadly shimmer like lightning or the
anger in the little eyes of the bears, it may be the beautiful shimmer
of the moving deer, or the pine-boughs softly swaying under snow.
Creation contains the unspeakably terrifying enemy, the unspeakably
lovely friend, as the maiden who brings us our food in dead of winter,
by her passion of tender wistfulness. Yet even this tender wistfulness
is the fearful danger of the wild creatures, deer and bear and buffalo,
which find their death in it.

There is, in our sense of the word, no God. But all is godly. There
is no Great Mind directing the universe. Yet the mystery of creation,
the wonder and fascination of creation shimmers in every leaf and
stone, in every thorn and bud, in the fangs of the rattlesnake, and
in the soft eyes of a fawn. Things utterly opposite are still pure
wonder of creation, the yell of the mountain-lion, and the breeze in
the aspen leaves. The Apache warrior in his war-paint, shrieking the
war-cry and cutting the throats of old women, still he is part of the
mystery of creation. He is godly as the growing corn. And the mystery
of creation makes us sharpen the knives and point the arrows in utmost
determination against him. It must be so. It is part of the wonder. And
to every part of the wonder we must answer in kind.

The Indian accepts Jesus on the Cross amid all the rest of the wonders.
The presence of Jesus on the Cross, or the pitiful Mary Mother, does
not in the least prevent the strange intensity of the war-dance. The
brave comes home with a scalp. In the morning he goes to Mass. Two
mysteries! The soul of man is the theatre in which every mystery is
enacted. Jesus, Mary, the snake-dance, red blood on the knife: it is
all the rippling of this untellable flood of creation, which, in a
narrow sense, we call Nature.

There is no division between actor and audience. It is all one.

There is no God looking on. The only god there is, is involved all
the time in the dramatic wonder and inconsistency of creation.
God is immersed, as it were, in creation, not to be separated or
distinguished. There can be no Ideal God.

And here finally you see the difference between Indian entertainment
and even the earliest form of Greek drama. Right at the beginning of
Old World dramatic presentation there was the onlooker, if only in the
shape of the God Himself, or the Goddess Herself, to whom the dramatic
offering was made. And this God or Goddess resolves, at last, into
a Mind occupied by some particular thought or idea. And in the long
course of evolution, we ourselves become the gods of our own drama. The
spectacle is offered to us. And we sit aloft, enthroned in the Mind,
dominated by some one exclusive idea, and we judge the show.

There is absolutely none of this in the Indian dance. There is no God.
There is no Onlooker. There is no Mind. There is no dominant idea. And
finally, there is no judgment: absolutely no judgment.

The Indian is completely embedded in the wonder of his own drama. It is
a drama that has no beginning and no end, it is all-inclusive. It can’t
be judged, because there is nothing outside it, to judge it.

The mind is there merely as a servant, to keep a man pure and true to
the mystery, which is always present. The mind bows down before the
creative mystery, even of the atrocious Apache warrior. It judges, not
the good and the bad, but the lie and the true. The Apache warrior in
all his atrocity, is true to his own creative mystery. And as such,
he must be fought. But he cannot be called a _lie_ on the face of the
earth. Hence he cannot be classed among the abominations, the cowards,
and the liars: those who betray the wonder.

The Indian, so long as he is pure, has only two great negative
commandments.

_Thou shalt not lie._

_Thou shalt not be a coward._

Positively, his one commandment is:

_Thou shalt acknowledge the wonder._

Evil lies in lying and in cowardice. Wickedness lies in witchcraft;
that is, in seeking to prostitute the creative wonder to the individual
mind and will, the individual conceit.

And virtue? Virtue lies in the heroic response to the creative wonder,
the utmost response. In the man, it is a valiant putting forth of all
his strength to meet and to run forward with the wonder. In woman
it is the putting forth of all herself in a delicate, marvellous
sensitiveness, which draws forth the wonder to herself, and draws the
man to the wonder in her, as it drew even the wild animals from the
lair of winter.

You see this so plainly in the Indian races. Naked and daubed with clay
to hide the nakedness, and to take the anointment of the earth; stuck
over with bits of fluff of eagle’s down, to be anointed with the power
of the air, the youths and men whirl down the racing track, in relays.
They are not racing to win a race. They are not racing for a prize.
They are not racing to show their prowess.

They are putting forth all their might, all their strength, in a
tension that is half anguish, half ecstasy, in the effort to gather
into their souls more and more of the creative fire, the creative
energy which shall carry their tribe through the year, through the
vicissitudes of the months, on, on, in the unending race of humanity
along the track of trackless creation. It is the heroic effort, the
sacred heroic effort which men _must_ make and must keep on making.
As if hurled from a catapult the Indian youth throws himself along
the course, working his body strangely incomprehensibly. And when his
turn comes again, he hurls himself forward with greater intensity, to
greater speed, driving himself, as it were, into the heart of the fire.
And the old men along the track encourage him, urge him with their
green twigs, laughingly, mockingly, teasingly, but at the same time
with an exquisite pure anxiety and concern.

And he walks away at last, his chest lifting and falling heavily, a
strange look in his eyes, having run with the changeless god who will
give us nothing unless we overtake him.




THE DANCE OF THE SPROUTING CORN




_The Dance of the Sprouting Corn_


Pale, dry, baked earth, that blows into dust of fine sand. Low hills of
baked pale earth, sinking heavily, and speckled sparsely with dark dots
of cedar bushes. A river on the plain of drought, just a cleft of dark,
reddish-brown water, almost a flood. And over all, the blue, uneasy,
alkaline sky.

A pale, uneven, parched world, where a motor-car rocks and lurches
and churns in sand. A world pallid with dryness, inhuman with a faint
taste of alkali. Like driving in the bed of a great sea that dried up
unthinkable ages ago, and now is drier than any other dryness, yet
still reminiscent of the bottom of the sea, sandhills sinking, and
straight, cracked mesas, like cracks in the dry-mud bottom of the sea.

So, the mud church standing discreetly outside, just outside the
pueblo, not to see too much. And on its façade of mud, under the
timbered mud-eaves, two speckled horses rampant, painted by the
Indians, a red piebald and a black one.

Swish! Over the logs of the ditch-bridge, where brown water is flowing
full. There below is the pueblo, dried mud like mud-pie houses, all
squatting in a jumble, prepared to crumble into dust and be invisible,
dust to dust returning, earth to earth.

That they don’t crumble is the mystery. That these little squarish
mud-heaps endure for centuries after centuries, while Greek marble
tumbles asunder, and cathedrals totter, is the wonder. But then, the
naked human hand with a bit of new soft mud is quicker than time, and
defies the centuries.

Roughly the low, square, mud-pie houses make a wide street where all is
naked earth save a doorway or a window with a pale-blue sash. At the
end of the street, turn again into a parallel wide, dry street. And
there, in the dry, oblong aridity, there tosses a small forest that is
alive; and thud--thud--thud goes the drum, and the deep sound of men
singing is like the deep soughing of the wind, in the depths of a wood.

You realize that you had heard the drum from the distance, also the
deep, distant roar and boom of the singing, but that you had not
heeded, as you don’t heed the wind.

It all tosses like young, agile trees in a wind. This is the dance of
the sprouting corn, and everybody holds a little, beating branch of
green pine. Thud--thud--thud--thud--thud! goes the drum, heavily the
men hop and hop and hop, sway, sway, sway, sway go the little branches
of green pine. It tosses like a little forest, and the deep sound of
men’s singing is like the booming and tearing of a wind deep inside a
forest. They are dancing the Spring Corn Dance.

This is the Wednesday after Easter, after Christ Risen and the corn
germinated. They dance on Monday and on Tuesday. Wednesday is the third
and last dance of this green resurrection.

You realize the long lines of dancers, and a solid cluster of men
singing near the drum. You realize the intermittent black-and-white
fantasy of the hopping Koshare, the jesters, the Delight-Makers.
You become aware of the ripple of bells on the knee-garters of the
dancers, a continual pulsing ripple of little bells; and of the sudden
wild, whooping yells from near the drum. Then you become aware of the
seed-like shudder of the gourd-rattles, as the dance changes, and the
swaying of the tufts of green pine-twigs stuck behind the arms of all
the dancing men, in the broad green arm-bands.

Gradually comes through to you the black, stable solidity of the
dancing women, who poise like solid shadow, one woman behind each
rippling, leaping male. The long, silky black hair of the women,
streaming down their backs, and the equally long, streaming, gleaming
hair of the males, loose over broad, naked, orange-brown shoulders.

Then the faces, the impassive, rather fat, golden-brown faces of the
women, with eyes cast down, crowned above with the green tableta, like
a flat tiara. Something strange and noble about the impassive, barefoot
women in the short black cassocks, as they subtly tread the dance,
scarcely moving, and yet edging rhythmically along, swaying from each
hand the green spray of pine-twig out--out--out--out, to the thud of
the drum, immediately behind the leaping fox-skin of the men-dancers.
And all the emerald-green, painted tabletas, the flat wooden tiaras
shaped like a castle gateway, rise steady and noble from the soft,
slightly bowed heads of the women, held by a band under the chin. All
the tabletas down the line, emerald green, almost steady, while the
bright black heads of the men leap softly up and down, between.

Bit by bit you take it in. You cannot get a whole impression, save of
some sort of wood tossing, a little forest of trees in motion, with
gleaming black hair and gold-ruddy breasts that somehow do not destroy
the illusion of forest.

When you look at the women, you forget the men. The bare-armed,
bare-legged, barefoot women with streaming hair and lofty green
tiaras, impassive, downward-looking faces, twigs swaying outwards from
subtle, rhythmic wrists; women clad in the black, prehistoric short
gown fastened over one shoulder, leaving the other shoulder bare, and
showing at the arm-place a bit of pink or white undershirt; belted also
round the waist with a woven woollen sash, scarlet and green on the
hand-woven black cassock. The noble, slightly submissive bending of the
tiara-ed head. The subtle measure of the bare, breathing, bird-like
feet, that are flat, and seem to cleave to earth softly, and softly
lift away. The continuous outward swaying of the pine-sprays.

But when you look at the men, you forget the women. The men are naked
to the waist, and ruddy-golden, and in the rhythmic, hopping leap of
the dance their breasts shake downwards, as the strong, heavy body
comes down, down, down, down, in the downward plunge of the dance.
The black hair streams loose and living down their backs, the black
brows are level, the black eyes look out unchanging from under the
silky lashes. They are handsome, and absorbed with a deep rhythmic
absorption, which still leaves them awake and aware. Down, down, down
they drop, on the heavy, ceaseless leap of the dance, and the great
necklaces of shell-cores spring on the naked breasts, the neck-shell
flaps up and down, the short white kilt of woven stuff, with the heavy
woollen embroidery, green and red and black, opens and shuts slightly
to the strong lifting of the knees: the heavy whitish cords that hang
from the kilt-band at the side sway and coil forever down the side of
the right leg, down to the ankle, the bells on the red-woven garters
under the knees ripple without end, and the feet, in buckskin boots
furred round the ankle with a beautiful band of skunk fur, black with
a white tip, come down with a lovely, heavy, soft precision, first
one, then the other, dropping always plumb to earth. Slightly bending
forward, a black gourd rattle in the right hand, a small green bough
in the left, the dancer dances the eternal drooping leap, that brings
his life down, down, down, down from the mind, down from the broad,
beautiful, shaking breast, down to the powerful pivot of the knees,
then to the ankles, and plunges deep from the ball of the foot into the
earth, towards the earth’s red centre, where these men belong, as is
signified by the red earth with which they are smeared.

And meanwhile, the shell-cores from the Pacific sway up and down,
ceaselessly, on their breasts.

Mindless, without effort, under the hot sun, unceasing, yet never
perspiring nor even breathing heavily, they dance on and on. Mindless,
yet still listening, observing. They hear the deep, surging singing of
the bunch of old men, like a great wind soughing. They hear the cries
and yells of the man waving his bough by the drum. They catch the word
of the song, and at a moment, shudder the black rattles, wheel, and the
line breaks, women from men, they thread across to a new formation. And
as the men wheel round, their black hair gleams and shakes, and the
long fox-skin sways, like a tail.

And always, when they form into line again, it is a beautiful long
straight line, flexible as life, but straight as rain.

The men round the drum are old, or elderly. They are all in a bunch,
and they wear day dress, loose cotton drawers, pink or white cotton
shirt, hair tied up behind with the red cords, and banded round the
head with a strip of pink rag, or white rag, or blue. There they are,
solid like a cluster of bees, their black heads with the pink rag
circles all close together, swaying their pine-twigs with rhythmic,
wind-swept hands, dancing slightly, mostly on the right foot,
ceaselessly, and singing, their black bright eyes absorbed, their dark
lips pushed out, while the deep strong sound rushes like wind, and the
unknown words form themselves in the dark.

Suddenly the solitary man pounding the drum swings his drum round, and
begins to pound on the other end, on a higher note, pang--pang--pang!
instead of the previous brumm! brumm! brumm! of the bass note. The
watchful man next the drummer yells and waves lightly, dancing on
bird-feet. The Koshare make strange, eloquent gestures to the sky.

And again the gleaming bronze-and-dark men dancing in the rows shudder
their rattles, break the rhythm, change into a queer, beautiful
two-step, the long lines suddenly curl into rings, four rings of
dancers, the leaping, gleaming-seeming men between the solid, subtle,
submissive blackness of the women who are crowned with emerald-green
tiaras, all going subtly round in rings. Then slowly they change again,
and form a star. Then again, unmingling, they come back into rows.

And all the while, all the while the naked Koshare are threading about.
Of bronze-and-dark men-dancers there are some forty-two, each with a
dark, crowned woman attending him like a shadow. The old men, the bunch
of singers in shirts and tied-up black hair, are about sixty in number,
or sixty-four. The Koshare are about twenty-four.

They are slim and naked, daubed with black and white earth, their hair
daubed white and gathered upwards to a great knot on top of the head,
whence springs a tuft of corn-husks, dry corn-leaves. Though they wear
nothing but a little black square cloth, front and back, at their
middle, they do not seem naked, for some are white with black spots,
like a leopard, and some have broad black lines or zigzags on their
smeared bodies, and all their faces are blackened with triangles or
lines till they look like weird masks. Meanwhile their hair, gathered
straight up and daubed white and sticking up from the top of the head
with corn-husks, completes the fantasy. They are anything but natural.
Like blackened ghosts of a dead corn-cob, tufted at the top.

And all the time, running like queer spotted dogs, they weave nakedly
through the unheeding dance, comical, weird, dancing the dance-step
naked and fine, prancing through the lines, up and down the lines, and
making fine gestures with their flexible hands, calling something down
from the sky, calling something up from the earth, and dancing forward
all the time. Suddenly as they catch a word from the singers, name of a
star, of a wind, a name for the sun, for a cloud, their hands soar up
and gather in the air, soar down with a slow motion. And again, as they
catch a word that means earth, earth deeps, water within the earth,
or red-earth-quickening, the hands flutter softly down, and draw up
the water, draw up the earth-quickening, earth to sky, sky to earth,
influences above to influences below, to meet in the germ-quick of
corn, where life is.

And as they dance, the Koshare watch the dancing men. And if a fox-skin
is coming loose at the belt, they fasten it as the man dances, or they
stoop and tie another man’s shoe. For the dancer must not hesitate to
the end.

And then, after some forty minutes, the drum stops. Slowly the dancers
file into one line, woman behind man, and move away, threading towards
their kiva, with no sound but the tinkle of knee-bells in the silence.

But at the same moment the thud of an unseen drum, from beyond, the
soughing of deep song approaching from the unseen. It is the other
half, the other half of the tribe coming to continue the dance. They
appear round the kiva--one Koshare and one dancer leading the rows, the
old men all abreast, singing already in a great strong burst.

So, from ten o’clock in the morning till about four in the afternoon,
first one-half then the other. Till at last, as the day wanes, the two
halves meet, and the two singings like two great winds surge one past
the other, and the thicket of the dance becomes a real forest. It is
the close of the third day.

Afterwards, the men and women crowd on the roofs of the two low round
towers, the kivas, while the Koshare run round jesting and miming,
and taking big offerings from the women, loaves of bread and cakes of
blue-maize meal. Women come carrying big baskets of bread and guayava,
on two hands, an offering.

And the mystery of germination, not procreation, but _putting forth_,
resurrection, life springing within the seed, is accomplished. The
sky has its fire, its waters, its stars, its wandering electricity,
its winds, its fingers of cold. The earth has its reddened body, its
invisible hot heart, its inner waters and many juices and unaccountable
stuffs. Between them all, the little seed: and also man, like a seed
that is busy and aware. And from the heights and from the depths man,
the caller, calls: man, the knower, brings down the influences and
brings up the influences, with his knowledge: man, so vulnerable, so
subject, and yet even in his vulnerability and subjection, a master,
commands the invisible influences and is obeyed. Commands in that song,
in that rhythmic energy of dance, in that still-submissive mockery of
the Koshare. And he accomplishes his end, as master. He partakes in
the springing of the corn, in the rising and budding and earing of the
corn. And when he eats his bread, at last, he recovers all he once sent
forth, and partakes again of the energies he called to the corn, from
out of the wide universe.




THE HOPI SNAKE DANCE




_The Hopi Snake Dance_


The Hopi country is in Arizona, next the Navajo country, and some
seventy miles north of the Santa Fé railroad. The Hopis are Pueblo
Indians, village Indians, so their reservation is not large. It
consists of a square track of greyish, unappetising desert, out of
which rise three tall arid mesas, broken off in ragged, pallid rock.
On the top of the mesas perch the ragged, broken, greyish pueblos,
identical with the mesas on which they stand.

The nearest village, Walpi, stands in half-ruin high, high on a narrow
rock-top where no leaf of life ever was tender. It is all grey, utterly
dry, utterly pallid, stone and dust, and very narrow. Below it all the
stark light of the dry Arizona sun.

Walpi is called the “first mesa.” And it is at the far edge of Walpi
you see the withered beaks and claws and bones of sacrificed eagles, in
a rock-cleft under the sky. They sacrifice an eagle each year, on the
brink, by rolling him out and crushing him so as to shed no blood. Then
they drop his remains down the dry cleft in the promontory’s farthest
grey tip.

The trail winds on, utterly bumpy and horrible, for thirty miles, past
the second mesa, where Chimopova is, on to the third mesa. And on the
Sunday afternoon of August 17th black automobile after automobile
lurched and crawled across the grey desert, where low, grey, sage-scrub
was coming to pallid yellow. Black hood followed crawling after black
hood, like a funeral cortège. The motor-cars, with all the tourists,
wending their way to the third and farthest mesa, thirty miles across
this dismal desert where an odd water-windmill spun, and odd patches of
corn blew in the strong desert wind, like dark-green women with fringed
shawls blowing and fluttering, not far from the foot of the great,
grey, up-piled mesa.

The snake dance (I am told) is held once a year, on each of the three
mesas in succession. This year of grace 1924 it was to be held in
Hotevilla, the last village on the furthest western tip of the third
mesa.

On and on bumped the cars. The lonely second mesa lay in the distance.
On and on, to the ragged ghost of the third mesa.

The third mesa has two main villages, Oraibi, which is on the near
edge, and Hotevilla, on the far. Up scrambles the car, on all its
four legs, like a black-beetle straddling past the schoolhouse and
store down below, up the bare rock and over the changeless boulders,
with a surge and a sickening lurch to the sky-brim, where stands the
rather foolish church. Just beyond, dry, grey, ruined, and apparently
abandoned, Oraibi, its few ragged stone huts. All these cars come all
this way, and apparently nobody at home.

You climb still, up the shoulder of rock, a few more miles, across the
lofty, wind-swept mesa, and so you come to Hotevilla, where the dance
is, and where already hundreds of motor-cars are herded in an official
camping-ground, among the piñon bushes.

Hotevilla is a tiny little village of grey little houses, raggedly
built with undressed stone and mud around a little oblong plaza, and
partly in ruins. One of the chief two-storey houses on the small square
is a ruin, with big square window-holes.

It is a parched, grey country of snakes and eagles, pitched up against
the sky. And a few dark-faced, short, thickly built Indians have their
few peach trees among the sand, their beans and squashes on the naked
sand under the sky, their springs of brackish water.

Three thousand people came to see the little snake dance this year,
over miles of desert and bumps. Three thousand, of all sorts, cultured
people from New York, Californians, onward-pressing tourists, cowboys,
Navajo Indians, even negroes; fathers, mothers, children, of all ages,
colours, sizes of stoutness, dimensions of curiosity.

What had they come for? Mostly to see men hold _live rattlesnakes_ in
their mouths. “_I never did see a rattlesnake, and I’m crazy to see
one!_” cried a girl with bobbed hair.

There you have it. People trail hundreds of miles, avidly, to see this
circus-performance of men handling live rattlesnakes that may bite them
any minute--even do bite them. Some show, that!

There is the other aspect, of the ritual dance. One may look on from
the angle of culture, as one looks on while Anna Pavlova dances with
the Russian Ballet.

Or there is still another point of view, the religious. Before the
snake dance begins, on the Monday, and the spectators are packed thick
on the ground round the square, and in the window-holes, and on all
the roofs, all sorts of people greedy with curiosity, a little speech
is made to them all, asking the audience to be silent and respectful,
as this is a sacred religious ceremonial of the Hopi Indians, and not
a public entertainment. Therefore, please, no clapping or cheering or
applause, but remember you are, as it were, in a church.

The audience accepts the implied rebuke in good faith, and looks round
with a grin at the “church.” But it is a good-humoured, very decent
crowd, ready to respect any sort of feelings. And the Indian with his
“religion” is a sort of public pet.

From the cultured point of view, the Hopi snake dance is almost
nothing, not much more than a circus turn, or the games that children
play in the street. It has none of the impressive beauty of the Corn
Dance at Santo Domingo, for example. The big pueblos of Zuni, Santo
Domingo, Taos have a cultured instinct which is not revealed in the
Hopi snake dance. This last is grotesque rather than beautiful, and
rather uncouth in its touch of horror. Hence the thrill, and the crowd.

As a cultured spectacle, it is a circus turn: men actually dancing
round with snakes, poisonous snakes, dangling from their mouths.

And as a religious ceremonial: well, you can either be politely
tolerant like the crowd to the Hopis; or you must have some spark of
understanding of the sort of religion implied.

“Oh, the Indians,” I heard a woman say, “they believe we are all
brothers, the snakes are the Indians’ brothers, and the Indians are the
snakes’ brothers. The Indians would never hurt the snakes, they won’t
hurt any animal. So the snakes won’t bite the Indians. They are all
brothers, and none of them hurt anybody.”

This sounds very nice, only more Hindoo than Hopi. The dance itself
does not convey much sense of fraternal communion. It is not in the
least like St. Francis preaching to the birds.

The animistic religion, as we call it, is not the religion of the
Spirit. A religion of spirits, yes. But not of Spirit. There is no One
Spirit. There is no One God. There is no Creator. There is strictly no
God at all: because all is alive. In our conception of religion there
exists God and His Creation: two things. We are creatures of God,
therefore we pray to God as the Father, the Saviour, the Maker.

But strictly, in the religion of aboriginal America, there is no
Father, and no Maker. There is the great living source of life: say
the Sun of existence: to which you can no more pray than you can pray
to Electricity. And emerging from this Sun are the great potencies,
the invincible influences which make shine and warmth and rain. From
these great interrelated potencies of rain and heat and thunder emerge
the seeds of life itself, corn, and creatures like snakes. And beyond
these, men, persons. But all emerge separately. There is no oneness, no
sympathetic identifying oneself with the rest. The law of isolation is
heavy on every creature.

Now the Sun, the rain, the shine, the thunder, they are alive. But they
are not persons or people. They are alive. They are manifestations of
living activity. But they are not personal Gods.

Everything lives. Thunder lives, and rain lives, and sunshine lives.
But not in the personal sense.

How is man to get himself into relation with the vast living
convulsions of rain and thunder and sun, which are conscious and
alive and potent, but like vastest of beasts, inscrutable and
incomprehensible. How is man to get himself into relation with these,
the vastest of cosmic beasts?

It is the problem of the ages of man. Our religion says the cosmos is
Matter, to be conquered by the Spirit of Man. The yogi, the fakir,
the saint try conquest by abnegation and by psychic powers. The real
conquest of the cosmos is made by science.

The American-Indian sees no division into Spirit and Matter, God and
not-God. Everything is alive, though not personally so. Thunder is
neither Thor nor Zeus. Thunder is the vast living thunder asserting
itself like some incomprehensible monster, or some huge reptile-bird of
the pristine cosmos.

How to conquer the dragon-mouthed thunder! How to capture the feathered
rain!

We make reservoirs, and irrigation ditches and artesian wells. We make
lightning conductors, and build vast electric plants. We say it is a
matter of science, energy, force.

But the Indian says No! It all lives. We must approach it fairly,
with profound respect, but also with desperate courage. Because man
must conquer the cosmic monsters of living thunder and live rain. The
rain that slides down from its source, and ebbs back subtly, with a
strange energy generated between its coming and going, an energy
which, even to our science, is of life: this, man has to conquer. The
serpent-striped, feathery Rain.

We made the conquest by dams and reservoirs and windmills. The Indian,
like the old Egyptian, seeks to make the conquest from the mystic will
within him, pitted against the Cosmic Dragon.

We must remember, to the animistic vision there is no perfect God
behind us, who created us from his knowledge, and foreordained all
things. No such God. Behind lies only the terrific, terrible, crude
Source, the mystic Sun, the well-head of all things. From this mystic
Sun emanate the Dragons, Rain, Wind, Thunder, Shine, Light. The
Potencies or Powers. These bring forth Earth, then reptiles, birds, and
fishes.

The Potencies are not Gods. They are Dragons. The Sun of Creation
itself is a dragon most terrible, vast, and most powerful, yet even so,
less in being than we. The only gods on earth are men. For gods, like
man, do not exist beforehand. They are created and evolved gradually,
with æons of effort, out of the fire and smelting of life. They are the
highest thing created, smelted between the furnace of the Life-Sun, and
beaten on the anvil of the rain, with hammers or thunder and bellows
of rushing wind. The cosmos is a great furnace, a dragon’s den, where
the heroes and demi-gods, men, forge themselves into being. It is a
vast and violent matrix, where souls form like diamonds in earth, under
extreme pressure.

So that gods are the outcome, not the origin. And the best gods that
have resulted, so far, are men. But gods frail as flowers; which have
also the godliness of things that have won perfection out of the
terrific dragon-clutch of the cosmos. Men are frail as flowers. Man is
as a flower, rain can kill him or succour him, heat can flick him with
a bright tail, and destroy him: or, on the other hand, it can softly
call him into existence, out of the egg of chaos. Man is delicate as a
flower, godly beyond flowers, and his lordship is a ticklish business.

He has to conquer, and hold his own, and again conquer all the time.
Conquer the powers of the cosmos. To us, science is our religion of
conquest. Hence through science, we are the conquerors and resultant
gods of our earth. But to the Indian, the so-called mechanical
processes do not exist. All lives. And the conquest is made by the
means of the living will.

This is the religion of all aboriginal America, Peruvian, Aztec,
Athabascan: perhaps the aboriginal religion of all the world. In
Mexico, men fell into horror of the crude, pristine gods, the dragons.
But to the pueblo Indian, the most terrible dragon is still somewhat
gentle-hearted.

This brings us back to the Hopi. He has the hardest task, the
stubbornest destiny. Some inward fate drove him to the top of these
parched mesas, all rocks and eagles, sand and snakes, and wind and sun
and alkali. These he had to conquer. Not merely, as we should put it,
the natural conditions of the place. But the mysterious life-spirit
that reigned there. The eagle and the snake.

It is a destiny as well as another. The destiny of the animistic soul
of man, instead of our destiny of Mind and Spirit. We have undertaken
the scientific conquest of forces, of natural conditions. It has been
comparatively easy, and we are victors. Look at our black motor-cars
like beetles working up the rock-face at Oraibi. Look at our three
thousand tourists gathered to gaze at the twenty lonely men who dance
in the tribe’s snake dance!

The Hopi sought the conquest by means of the mystic, living will that
is in man, pitted against the living will of the dragon-cosmos. The
Egyptians long ago made a partial conquest by the same means. We have
made a partial conquest by other means. Our corn doesn’t fail us: we
have no seven years’ famine, and apparently need never have. But the
other thing fails us, the strange inward sun of life; the pellucid
monster of the rain never shows us his stripes. To us, heaven switches
on daylight, or turns on the shower-bath. We little gods are gods of
the machine only. It is our highest. Our cosmos is a great engine. And
we die of ennui. A subtle dragon stings us in the midst of plenty.
_Quos vult perdere Deus, dementat prius._

On the Sunday evening is a first little dance in the plaza at
Hotevilla, called the Antelope dance. There is the hot, sandy, oblong
little place, with a tuft of green cotton-wood boughs stuck like a
plume at the south end, and on the floor at the foot of the green, a
little lid of a trap-door. They say the snakes are under there.

They say that the twelve officiating men of the snake clan of the
tribe have for nine days been hunting snakes in the rocks. They have
been performing the mysteries for nine days, in the kiva, and for two
days they have fasted completely. All these days they have tended
the snakes, washed them with repeated lustrations, soothed them, and
exchanged spirits with them. The spirit of man soothing and seeking
and making interchange with the spirits of the snakes. For the snakes
are more rudimentary, nearer to the great convulsive powers. Nearer
to the nameless Sun, more knowing in the slanting tracks of the rain,
the pattering of the invisible feet of the rain-monster from the sky.
The snakes are man’s next emissaries to the rain-gods. The snakes lie
nearer to the source of potency, the dark, lurking, intense sun at
the centre of the earth. For to the cultured animist, and the pueblo
Indian is such, the earth’s dark centre holds its dark sun, our source
of isolated being, round which our world coils its folds like a great
snake. The snake is nearer the dark sun, and cunning of it.

They say--people say--that rattlesnakes are not travellers. They haunt
the same spots on earth, and die there. It is said also that the
snake-priests (so-called) of the Hopi, probably capture the same snakes
year after year.

Be that as it may. At sundown before the real dance, there is the
little dance called the Antelope Dance. We stand and wait on a
house-roof. Behind us is tethered an eagle; rather dishevelled he sits
on the coping, and looks at us in unutterable resentment. See him,
and see how much “brotherhood” the Indian feels with animals--at best
the silent tolerance that acknowledges dangerous difference. We wait
without event. There are no drums, no announcements. Suddenly into the
plaza, with rude, intense movements, hurries a little file of men. They
are smeared all with grey and black, and are naked save for little
kilts embroidered like the sacred dance-kilts in other pueblos, red and
green and black on a white fibre-cloth. The fox-skins hang behind. The
feet of the dancers are pure ash-grey. Their hair is long.

The first is a heavy old man with heavy, long, wild grey hair and
heavy fringe. He plods intensely forward, in the silence, followed
in a sort of circle by the other grey-smeared, long-haired, naked,
concentrated men. The oldest men are first: the last is a short-haired
boy of fourteen or fifteen. There are only eight men--the so-called
antelope-priests. They pace round in a circle, rudely, absorbedly,
till the first heavy, intense old man with his massive grey hair
flowing, comes to the lid on the ground, near the tuft of kiva-boughs.
He rapidly shakes from the hollow of his right hand a little white
meal on the lid, stamps heavily, with naked right foot, on the meal,
so the wood resounds, and paces heavily forward. Each man, to the boy,
shakes meal, stamps, paces absorbedly on in the circle, comes to the
lid again, shakes meal, stamps, paces absorbedly on, comes a third time
to the lid, or trap-door, and this time spits on the lid, stamps, and
goes on. And this time the eight men file away behind the lid, between
it and the tuft of green boughs. And there they stand in a line, their
backs to the kiva-tuft of green; silent, absorbed, bowing a little to
the ground.

Suddenly paces with rude haste another file of men. They are naked, and
smeared with red “medicine,” with big black lozenges of smeared paint
on their backs. Their wild heavy hair hangs loose, the old, heavy,
grey-haired men go first, then the middle-aged, then the young men,
then last, two short-haired, slim boys, schoolboys. The hair of the
young men, growing after school, is bobbed round.

The grown men are all heavily built, rather short, with heavy but
shapely flesh, and rather straight sides. They have not the archaic
slim waists of the Taos Indians. They have an archaic squareness, and
a sensuous heaviness. Their very hair is black, massive, heavy. These
are the so-called snake-priests, men of the snake clan. And to-night,
they are eleven in number.

They pace rapidly round, with that heavy wild silence of concentration
characteristic of them, and cast meal and stamp upon the lid, cast
meal and stamp in the second round, come round and spit and stamp in
the third. For to the savage, the animist, to spit may be a kind of
blessing, a communion, a sort of embrace.

The eleven snake-priests form silently in a row, facing the eight
grey-smeared antelope-priests across the little lid, and bowing forward
a little, to earth. Then the antelope-priests, bending forward, begin
a low, sombre chant, or call, that sounds wordless, only a deep,
low-toned, secret Ay-a! Ay-a! Ay-a! And they bend from right to left,
giving two shakes to the little, flat, white rattle in their left hand,
at each shake, and stamping the right foot in heavy rhythm. In their
right hand, that held the meal, is grasped a little skin bag, perhaps
also containing meal.

They lean from right to left, two seed-like shakes of the rattle
each time and the heavy rhythmic stamp of the foot, and the low,
sombre, secretive chant-call each time. It is a strange low sound,
such as we never hear, and it reveals how deep, how deep the men are
in the mystery they are practising, how sunk deep below our world,
to the world of snakes, and dark ways in the earth, where are the
roots of corn, and where the little rivers of unchannelled, uncreated
life-passion run like dark, trickling lightning, to the roots of the
corn and to the feet and loins of men, from the earth’s innermost dark
sun. They are calling in the deep, almost silent snake-language, to the
snakes and the rays of dark emission from the earth’s inward “Sun.”

At this moment, a silence falls on the whole crowd of listeners. It
is that famous darkness and silence of Egypt, the touch of the other
mystery. The deep concentration of the “priests” conquers, for a few
seconds, our white-faced flippancy, and we hear only the deep Háh-ha!
Háh-ha! speaking to snakes and the earth’s inner core.

This lasts a minute or two. Then the antelope-priests stand bowed and
still, and the snake-priests take up the swaying and the deep chant,
that sometimes is so low, it is like a mutter underground, inaudible.
The rhythm is crude, the swaying unison is all uneven. Culturally,
there is nothing. If it were not for that mystic, dark-sacred
concentration.

Several times in turn, the two rows of daubed, long-haired, insunk men
facing one another take up the swaying and the chant. Then that too is
finished. There is a break in the formation. A young snake-priest takes
up something that may be a corn-cob--perhaps an antelope-priest hands
it to him--and comes forward, with an old, heavy, but still shapely
snake-priest behind him dusting his shoulders with the feathers,
eagle-feathers presumably, which are the Indians’ hollow prayer-sticks.
With the heavy, stamping hop they move round in the previous circle,
the young priest holding the cob curiously, and the old priest prancing
strangely at the young priest’s back, in a sort of incantation, and
brushing the heavy young shoulders delicately with the prayer-feathers.
It is the God-vibration that enters us from behind, and is transmitted
to the hands, from the hands to the corn-cob. Several young priests
emerge, with the bowed head and the cob in their hands and the heavy
older priests hanging over them behind. They tread round the rough
curve and come back to the kiva, take perhaps another cob, and tread
round again.

That is all. In ten or fifteen minutes it is over. The two files file
rapidly and silently away. A brief, primitive performance.

The crowd disperses. They were not many people. There were no venomous
snakes on exhibition, so the mass had nothing to come for. And
therefore the curious immersed intensity of the priests was able to
conquer the white crowd.

By afternoon of the next day the three thousand people had massed
in the little plaza, secured themselves places on the roofs and in
the window-spaces, everywhere, till the small pueblo seemed built of
people instead of stones. All sorts of people, hundreds and hundreds
of white women, all in breeches like half-men, hundreds and hundreds
of men who had been driving motor-cars, then many Navajos, the women
in their full, long skirts and tight velvet bodices, the men rather
lanky, long-waisted, real nomads. In the hot sun and the wind which
blows the sand every day, every day in volumes round the corners, the
three thousand tourists sat for hours, waiting for the show. The Indian
policeman cleared the central oblong, in front of the kiva. The front
rows of onlookers sat thick on the ground. And at last, rather early,
because of the masses awaiting them, suddenly, silently, in the same
rude haste, the antelope-priests filed absorbedly in, and made the
rounds over the lid, as before. To-day, the eight antelope-priests
were very grey. Their feet ashed pure grey, like suède soft boots: and
their lower jaw was pure suède grey, while the rest of the face was
blackish. With that pale-grey jaw, they looked like corpse-faces with
swathing-bands. And all their bodies ash-grey smeared, with smears of
black, and a black cloth to-day at the loins.

They made their rounds, and took their silent position behind the
lid, with backs to the green tuft: an unearthly grey row of men with
little skin bags in their hands. They were the lords of shadow, the
intermediate twilight, the place of after-life and before-life, where
house the winds of change. Lords of the mysterious, fleeting power of
change.

Suddenly, with abrupt silence, in paced the snake-priests, headed by
the same heavy man with solid grey hair like iron. To-day they were
twelve men, from the old one, down to the slight, short-haired, erect
boy of fourteen. Twelve men, two for each of the six worlds, or
quarters: east, north, south, west, above, and below. And to-day they
were in a queer ecstasy. Their faces were black, showing the whites
of the eyes. And they wore small black loin-aprons. They were the hot
living men of the darkness, lords of the earth’s inner rays, the black
sun of the earth’s vital core, from which dart the speckled snakes,
like beams.

Round they went, in rapid, uneven, silent absorption, the three rounds.
Then in a row they faced the eight ash-grey men, across the lid. All
kept their heads bowed towards earth, except the young boys.

Then, in the intense, secret, muttering chant the grey men began their
leaning from right to left, shaking the hand, one-two, one-two, and
bowing the body each time from right to left, left to right, above the
lid in the ground, under which were the snakes. And their low, deep,
mysterious voices spoke to the spirits under the earth, not to men
above the earth.

But the crowd was on tenterhooks for the snakes, and could hardly wait
for the mummery to cease. There was an atmosphere of inattention and
impatience. But the chant and the swaying passed from the grey men to
the black-faced men, and back again, several times.

This was finished. The formation of the lines broke up. There was a
slight crowding to the centre, round the lid. The old antelope-priest
(so-called) was stooping. And before the crowd could realize anything
else a young priest emerged, bowing reverently, with the neck of a
pale, delicate rattlesnake held between his teeth, the little, naive,
bird-like head of the rattlesnake quite still, near the black cheek,
and the long, pale, yellowish, spangled body of the snake dangling
like some thick, beautiful cord. On passed the black-faced young
priest, with the wondering snake dangling from his mouth, pacing in the
original circle, while behind him, leaping almost on his shoulders, was
the oldest heavy priest, dusting the young man’s shoulders with the
feather-prayer-sticks, in an intense, earnest anxiety of concentration
such as I have only seen in the old Indian men during a religious dance.

Came another young black-faced man out of the confusion, with another
snake dangling and writhing a little from his mouth, and an elder
priest dusting him from behind with the feathers: and then another,
and another: till it was all confusion, probably, of six, and then
four young priests with snakes dangling from their mouths, going round,
apparently, three times in the circle. At the end of the third round
the young priest stooped and delicately laid his snake on the earth,
waving him away, away, as it were, into the world. He must not wriggle
back to the kiva bush.

And after wondering a moment, the pale, delicate snake steered away
with a rattlesnake’s beautiful movement, rippling and looping, with
the small, sensitive head lifted like antennæ, across the sand to the
massed audience squatting solid on the ground around. Like soft, watery
lightning went the wondering snake at the crowd. As he came nearer, the
people began to shrink aside, half-mesmerised. But they betrayed no
exaggerated fear. And as the little snake drew very near, up rushed one
of the two black-faced young priests who held the snake-stick, poised a
moment over the snake, in the prayer-concentration of reverence which
is at the same time conquest, and snatched the pale, long creature
delicately from the ground, waving him in a swoop over the heads of the
seated crowd, then delicately smoothing down the length of the snake
with his left hand, stroking and smoothing and soothing the long,
pale, bird-like thing; and returning with it to the kiva, handed it to
one of the grey-jawed antelope-priests.

Meanwhile, all the time, the other young priests were emerging with
a snake dangling from their mouths. The boy had finished his rounds.
He launched his rattlesnake on the ground, like a ship, and like a
ship away it steered. In a moment, after it went one of those two
young black-faced priests who carried snake-sticks and were the
snake-catchers. As it neared the crowd, very close, he caught it up
and waved it dramatically, his eyes glaring strangely out of his black
face. And in the interim that youngest boy had been given a long,
handsome bull-snake, by the priest at the hole under the kiva-boughs.
The bull-snake is not poisonous. It is a constrictor. This one was
six feet long, with a sumptuous pattern. It waved its pale belly, and
pulled its neck out of the boy’s mouth. With two hands he put it back.
It pulled itself once more free. Again he got it back, and managed to
hold it. And then, as he went round in his looping circle, it coiled
its handsome folds twice round his knee. He stooped, quietly, and as
quietly as if he were untying his garter, he unloosed the folds. And
all the time, an old priest was intently brushing the boy’s thin
straight shoulders with the feathers. And all the time, the snakes
seemed strangely gentle, naive, wondering, and almost willing, almost
in harmony with the men. Which of course was the sacred aim. While the
boy’s expression remained quite still and simple, as it were candid, in
a candour where he and the snake should be in unison. The only dancers
who showed signs of being wrought-up were the two young snake-catchers,
and one of these, particularly, seemed in a state of actor-like uplift,
rather ostentatious. But the old priests had that immersed, religious
intentness which is like a spell, something from another world.

The young boy launched his bull-snake. It wanted to go back to the
kiva. The snake-catcher drove it gently forward. Away it went, towards
the crowd, and at the last minute was caught up into the air. Then this
snake was handed to an old man sitting on the ground in the audience,
in the front row. He was an old Hopi of the Snake clan.

Snake after snake had been carried round in the circles, dangling by
the neck from the mouths of one young priest or another, and writhing
and swaying slowly, with the small, delicate snake-head held as if
wondering and listening. There had been some very large rattlesnakes,
unusually large, two or three handsome bull-snakes, and some racers,
whipsnakes. All had been launched, after their circuits in the mouth,
all had been caught up by the young priests with the snake-sticks,
one or two had been handed to old snake-clan men in the audience, who
sat holding them in their arms as men hold a kitten. The most of the
snakes, however, had been handed to the grey antelope-men who stood
in the row, with their backs to the kiva bush. Till some of these
ash-smeared men held armfuls of snakes, hanging over their arms like
wet washing. Some of the snakes twisted and knotted round one another,
showing pale bellies.

Yet most of them hung very still and docile. Docile, almost
sympathetic, so that one was struck only by their clean, slim length of
snake nudity, their beauty, like soft, quiescent lightning. They were
so clean, because they had been washed and anointed and lustrated by
the priests, in the days they had been in the kiva.

At last all the snakes had been mouth-carried in the circuits, and had
made their little outrunning excursion to the crowd, and had been
handed back to the priests in the rear. And now the Indian policemen,
Hopi and Navajo, began to clear away the crowd that sat on the ground,
five or six rows deep, around the small plaza. The snakes were all
going to be set free on the ground. We must clear away.

We recoiled to the further end of the plaza. There, two Hopi women were
scattering white corn-meal on the sandy ground. And thither came the
two snake-catchers, almost at once, with their arms full of snakes. And
before we who stood had realized it, the snakes were all writhing and
squirming on the ground, in the white dust of meal, a couple of yards
from our feet. Then immediately, before they could writhe clear of each
other and steer away, they were gently, swiftly snatched up again, and
with their arms full of snakes, the two young priests went running out
of the plaza.

We followed slowly, wondering, towards the western, or north-western
edge of the mesa. There the mesa dropped steeply, and a broad trail
wound down to the vast hollow of desert brimmed up with strong evening
light, up out of which jutted a perspective of sharp rock and further
mesas and distant sharp mountains: the great, hollow, rock-wilderness
space of that part of Arizona, submerged in light.

Away down the trail, small, dark, naked, rapid figures with arms held
close, went the two young men, running swiftly down to the hollow
level, and diminishing, running across the hollow towards more stark
rocks of the other side. Two small, rapid, intent, dwindling little
human figures. The tiny, dark sparks of men. Such specks of gods.

They disappeared, no bigger than stones, behind rocks in shadow. They
had gone, it was said, to lay down the snakes before a rock called the
snake-shrine, and let them all go free. Free to carry the message and
thanks to the dragon-gods who can give and withhold. To carry the human
spirit, the human breath, the human prayer, the human gratitude, the
human command which had been breathed upon them in the mouths of the
priests, transferred into them from those feather-prayer-sticks which
the old wise men swept upon the shoulders of the young, snake-bearing
men, to carry this back, into the vaster, dimmer, inchoate regions
where the monsters of rain and wind alternated in beneficence and
wrath. Carry the human prayer and will-power into the holes of the
winds, down into the octopus heart of the rain-source. Carry the
corn-meal which the women had scattered, back to that terrific, dread,
and causeful dark sun which is at the earth’s core, that which sends us
corn out of the earth’s nearness, sends us food or death, according to
our strength of vital purpose, our power of sensitive will, our courage.

It is battle, a wrestling all the time. The Sun, the nameless Sun,
source of all things, which we call sun because the other name is
too fearful, this, this vast dark protoplasmic sun from which issues
all that feeds our life, this original One is all the time willing
and unwilling. Systole, diastole, it pulses its willingness and its
unwillingness that we should live and move on, from being to being,
manhood to further manhood. Man, small, vulnerable man, the farthest
adventurer from the dark heart of the first of suns, into the cosmos
of creation. Man, the last god won into existence. And all the time,
he is sustained and threatened, menaced and sustained from the Source,
the innermost sun-dragon. And all the time, he must submit and he must
conquer. Submit to the strange beneficence from the Source, whose ways
are past finding out. And conquer the strange malevolence of the
Source, which is past comprehension also.

For the great dragons from which we draw our vitality are all the time
willing and unwilling that we should have being. Hence only the heroes
snatch manhood, little by little, from the strange den of the Cosmos.

Man, little man, with his consciousness and his will, must both submit
to the great origin-powers of his life, and conquer them. Conquered by
man who has overcome his fears, the snakes must go back into the earth
with his messages of tenderness, of request, and of power. They go
back as rays of love to the dark heart of the first of suns. But they
go back also as arrows shot clean by man’s sapience and courage, into
the resistant, malevolent heart of the earth’s oldest, stubborn core.
In the core of the first of suns, whence man draws his vitality, lies
poison as bitter as the rattlesnake’s. This poison man must overcome,
he must be master of its issue. Because from the first of suns come
travelling the rays that make men strong and glad and gods who can
range between the known and the unknown. Rays that quiver out of the
earth as serpents do, naked with vitality. But each ray charged with
poison for the unwary, the irreverent, and the cowardly. Awareness,
wariness, is the first virtue in primitive man’s morality. And his
awareness must travel back and forth, back and forth, from the darkest
origins out to the brightest edifices of creation.

And amid all its crudity, and the sensationalism which comes chiefly
out of the crowd’s desire for thrills, one cannot help pausing in
reverence before the delicate, anointed bravery of the snake-priests
(so-called), with the snakes.

They say the Hopis have a marvellous secret cure for snake-bites. They
say the bitten are given an emetic drink, after the dance, by the old
women, and that they must lie on the edge of the cliff and vomit,
vomit, vomit. I saw none of this. The two snake-men who ran down into
the shadow came soon running up again, running all the while, and
steering off at a tangent, ran up the mesa once more, but beyond a
deep, impassable cleft. And there, when they had come up to our level,
we saw them across the cleft distance washing, brown and naked, in a
pool; washing off the paint, the medicine, the ecstasy, to come back
into daily life and eat food. Because for two days they had eaten
nothing, it was said. And for nine days they had been immersed in the
mystery of snakes, and fasting in some measure.

Men who have lived many years among the Indians say they do not believe
the Hopi have any secret cure. Sometimes priests do die of bites, it
is said. But a rattlesnake secretes his poison slowly. Each time he
strikes he loses his venom, until if he strikes several times, he has
very little wherewithal to poison a man. Not enough, not half enough
to kill. His glands must be very full charged with poison, as they are
when he merges from winter-sleep, before he can kill a man outright.
And even then, he must strike near some artery.

Therefore, during the nine days of the kiva, when the snakes are
bathed and lustrated, perhaps they strike their poison away into some
inanimate object. And surely they are soothed and calmed with such
things as the priests, after centuries of experience, know how to
administer to them.

We dam the Nile and take the railway across America. The Hopi smooths
the rattlesnake and carries him in his mouth, to send him back into the
dark places of the earth, an emissary to the inner powers.

To each sort of man his own achievement, his own victory, his own
conquest. To the Hopi, the origins are dark and dual, cruelty is coiled
in the very beginnings of all things, and circle after circle creation
emerges towards a flickering, revealed Godhead. With Man as the Godhead
so far achieved, waveringly and for ever incomplete, in this world.

To us and to the Orientals, the Godhead was perfect to start with,
and man makes but a mechanical excursion into a created and ordained
universe, an excursion of mechanical achievement, and of yearning for
the return to the perfect Godhead of the beginning.

To us, God was in the beginning, Paradise and the Golden Age have been
long lost, and all we can do is to win back.

To the Hopi, God is not yet, and the Golden Age lies far ahead. Out of
the dragon’s den of the cosmos, we have wrested only the beginnings of
our being, the rudiments of our Godhead.

Between the two visions lies the gulf of mutual negations. But ours was
the quickest way, so we are conquerors for the moment.

The American aborigines are radically, innately religious. The fabric
of their life is religious. But their religion is animistic, their
sources are dark and impersonal, their conflict with their “gods” is
slow, and unceasing.

This is true of the settled pueblo Indians and the wandering Navajo,
the ancient Maya, and the surviving Aztec. They are all involved at
every moment, in their old, struggling religion.

Until they break in a kind of hopelessness under our cheerful,
triumphant success. Which is what is rapidly happening. The young
Indians who have been to school for many years are losing their
religion, becoming discontented, bored, and rootless. An Indian
with his own religion inside him _cannot_ be bored. The flow of the
mystery is too intense all the time, too intense, even, for him to
adjust himself to circumstances which really are mechanical. Hence his
failure. So he, in his great religious struggle for the Godhead of man,
falls back beaten. The Personal God who ordained a mechanical cosmos
gave the victory to his sons, a mechanical triumph.

Soon after the dance is over, the Navajo begin to ride down the Western
trail, into the light. Their women, with velvet bodices and full, full
skirts, silver and turquoise tinkling thick on their breasts, sit back
on their horses and ride down the steep slope, looking wonderingly
around from their pleasant, broad, nomadic, Mongolian faces. And the
men, long, loose, thin, long-waisted, with tall hats on their brows and
low-sunk silver belts on their hips, come down to water their horses
at the spring. We say they look wild. But they have the remoteness of
their religion, their animistic vision, in their eyes, they can’t see
as we see. And they cannot accept us. They stare at us as the coyotes
stare at us: the gulf of mutual negation between us.

So in groups, in pairs, singly, they ride silently down into the lower
strata of light, the aboriginal Americans riding into their shut-in
reservations. While the white Americans hurry back to their motor-cars,
and soon the air buzzes with starting engines, like the biggest of
rattlesnakes buzzing.




A LITTLE MOONSHINE WITH LEMON




_A Little Moonshine with Lemon_

    “Ye Gods, he doth bestride the narrow world
    Like a Colossus...!”


There is a bright moon, so that even the vines make a shadow, and the
Mediterranean has a broad white shimmer between its dimness. By the
shore, the lights of the old houses twinkle quietly, and out of the
wall of the headland advances the glare of a locomotive’s lamps. It is
a feast day, St. Catherine’s Day, and the men are all sitting round the
little tables, down below, drinking wine or vermouth.

And what about the ranch, the little ranch in New Mexico? The time is
different there: but I too have drunk my glass to St. Catherine, so I
can’t be bothered to reckon. I consider that there, too, the moon is in
the south-east, standing, as it were, over Santa Fé, beyond the bend of
those mountains of Picoris.

_Sono io!_ say the Italians. I am I! Which sounds simpler than it is.

Because which I am I, after all, now that I have drunk a glass also to
St. Catherine, and the moon shines over the sea, and my thoughts, just
because they are fleetingly occupied by the moon on the Mediterranean,
and ringing with the last farewell: _Dunque, Signore! di nuovo!_--must
needs follow the moon-track south-west, to the great South-west, where
the ranch is.

They say: _in vino veritas_. Bah! They say so much! But in the wine of
St. Catherine, my little ranch, and the three horses down among the
timber. Or if it has snowed, the horses are gone away, and it is snow,
and the moon shines on the alfalfa slope, between the pines, and the
cabins are blind. There is nobody there. Everything shut up. Only the
big pine-tree in front of the house, standing still and unconcerned,
alive.

Perhaps when I have a _Weh_ at all, my Heimweh is for the tree in
front of the house, the overshadowing tree whose green top one never
looks at. But on the trunk one hangs the various odds and ends of iron
things. It is so near. One goes out of the door, and the tree-trunk is
there, like a guardian angel.

The tree-trunk, and the long work table, and the fence! Then beyond,
since it is night, and the moon shines, for me at least, away beyond is
a light, at Taos, or at Ranchos de Taos. Here, the castle of Noli is on
the western skyline. But there, no doubt it has snowed, since even here
the wind is cold. There it has snowed, and the nearly full moon blazes
wolf-life, as here it never blazes; risen like a were-wolf over the
mountains. So there is a faint hoar shagginess of pine-trees, away at
the foot of the alfalfa field, and a grey gleam of snow in the night,
on the level desert, and a ruddy point of human light, in Ranchos de
Taos.

And beyond, you see them even if you don’t see them, the circling
mountains, since there is a moon.

So, one hurries indoors, and throws more logs on the fire.

One doesn’t either. One hears Giovanni calling from below, to say good
night! He is going down to the village for a spell. _Vado giù, Signor
Lorenzo! Buona notte!_

And the Mediterranean whispers in the distance, a sound like in a
shell. And save that somebody is whistling, the night is very bright
and still. The Mediterranean, so eternally young, the very symbol
of youth! And Italy, so reputedly old, yet forever so child-like and
naive! Never, never for a moment able to comprehend the wonderful,
hoary age of America, the continent of the afterwards.

I wonder if I am here, or if I am just going to bed at the ranch.
Perhaps looking in Montgomery Ward’s catalogue for something for
Christmas, and drinking moonshine and hot water, since it is cold. Go
out and look if the chickens are shut up warm: if the horses are in
sight: if Susan, the black cow, has gone to her nest among the trees,
for the night. Cows don’t eat much at night. But Susan will wander in
the moon. The moon makes her uneasy. And the horses stamp around the
cabins.

In a cold like this, the stars snap like distant coyotes, beyond the
moon. And you’ll see the shadow of actual coyotes, going across the
alfalfa field. And the pine-trees make little noises, sudden and
stealthy, as if they were walking about. And the place heaves with
ghosts. That place, the ranch, heaves with ghosts. But when one has got
used to one’s own home-ghosts, be they never so many, and so potent,
they are like one’s own family, but nearer than the blood. It is the
ghosts one misses most, the ghosts there, of the Rocky Mountains, that
never go beyond the timber and that linger, like the animals, round the
water-spring. I know them, they know me: we go well together. But they
reproach me for going away. They are resentful too.

Perhaps the snow is in tufts on the greasewood bushes. Perhaps the blue
jays fall in a blue, metallic cloud out of the pine-trees in front of
the house, at dawn, in the terrific cold, when the dangerous light
comes watchful over the mountains, and touches the desert far-off,
far-off, beyond the Rio Grande.

And I, I give it up. There is a choice of vermouth, Marsala, red
wine or white. At the ranch, to-night, because it is cold, I should
have moonshine, not very good moonshine, but still warming: with hot
water and lemon, and sugar, and a bit of cinnamon from one of those
little red Schilling’s tins. And I should light my little stove in the
bedroom, and let it roar a bit, sucking the wind. Then dart to bed,
with all the ghosts of the ranch cosily round me, and sleep till the
very coldness of my emerged nose wakes me. Waking, I shall look at once
through the glass panels of the bedroom door, and see the trunk of the
great pine-tree, like a person on guard, and a low star just coming
over the mountain, very brilliant, like someone swinging an electric
lantern.

_Si vedrà la primavera_

_Fiorann’ i mandorlini_--

Ah, well, let it be vermouth, since there’s no moonshine with lemon and
cinnamon. Supposing I called Giovanni, and told him I wanted:

“_Un poco di chiar’ di luna, con canella e limone...._”


  Printed in Great Britain at
  _The Mayflower Press, Plymouth_. William Brendon & Son, Ltd.




Transcriber’s Notes


  Retained original spelling of non-English words throughout.
  Retained hyphenation of terms (or lack thereof) save as noted below.
  Table of Contents, Added lead “The” to “The Dance of the Sprouting Corn”.
  p.  31, Italicized _mesquite_.
  p.  65, Italicized _zaguan_ in “obscurity of the _zaguan_”.
  p.  75 and p. 76, Retained spelling of “swoollen”.
  p.  81, Changed “o” to “of” in “lake of trees”.
  p.  88, Italicized _reales_.
  p. 124, Changed “ryhthmically” to “rhythmically”.
  p. 124, Hyphenated “men-dancers”.
  p. 126, Changed “angle” to “ankle” in “furred round the ankle”.
  p. 148, Hyphenated “antelope-priests”.
  p. 158, Hyphenated “kiva-boughs”.
  p. 167, Capitalized “Godhead” in “With Man as the Godhead”.


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