Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths

During the earlier years of my life with the Zuñi Indians of western-central New Mexico, from the autumn of 1879 to the winter of 1881—before access to their country had been rendered easy by the completion of the Atlantic and Pacific railroad,—they remained, as regards their social and religious institutions and customs and their modes of thought, if not of daily life, the most archaic of the Pueblo or Aridian peoples. They still continue to be, as they have for centuries been, the most highly developed, yet characteristic and representative of all these people.

In fact, it is principally due to this higher development by the Zuñi, than by any of the other Pueblos, of the mytho-sociologic system distinctive in some measure of them all at the time of the Spanish conquest of the southwest, that they have maintained so long and so much more completely than any of the others the primitive characteristics of the Aridian phase of culture; this despite the fact that, being the descendants of the original dwellers in the famous "Seven Cities of Cibola," they were the earliest known of all the tribes within the territory of the United States. Like the other Pueblos, the Zuñians, when discovered, were found living in segregated towns; but unlike the other groups (each separate community of any one of which was autonomous except on rare occasions) they were permanently and closely confederated in both a political and hierarchical sense. In other words, all their subtribes and lesser towns were distinctively related to and ruled from a central tribe and town through priest-chiefs, representative of each of them, sitting under the supreme council or septuarchy of the "master priests of the house" in the central town itself, much as were the divisions and cities of the great Inca dominion in South America represented at and ruled from Cuzco, the central city and province of them all.

[326] It thus happened that, although one or another of the Zuñi subtribes was at different times partially and temporarily conquered by the Spaniards, they were never as a whole people subdued; and, although missions and chapels were ultimately established at one and another of their towns by the Franciscan friars, they were never all of them immediately under mission influence and surveillance at any one time until a comparatively recent date. The evidences and tragic consequences of this may be traced throughout the history of Spanish intercourse, and as the measure of its effect in minimizing the influence of Spanish thought and example on Zuñi culture and habits is of great importance in determining to what extent the following sacred myths may be regarded as purely aboriginal, a brief outline of this history is regarded as desirable.

The first discovered of the Seven Cities of Cibola or Zuñiland, called by the Zuñis themselves Shíwona, was by native account the most easterly of their towns, the K‘yä´kime of tradition and the Caquima of later Spanish record. According also to native tradition it was entered by Estevanico, the negro spy of Fray Marcos de Niza, and the Black Mexican of Zuñi story, in the spring of 1539. The negro was forthwith killed by the inhabitants; but the friar, following him shortly after, saw from the mesa heights to the southward one of the seven villages, and, making good his escape, reported his discovery to the viceroy of Mexico, Don Antonio de Mendoza.

Only a year later the largest of the westerly towns, Háwik’uh (Aquico) was stormed and its inhabitants partly subdued, partly driven away to the great tribal stronghold, Thunder mountain, by that valiant knight, Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, and his vanguard of hardy mail-clad soldiers. The little army occupied as headquarters, for several months, the town they had captured, and later the more numerous rear of the army were quartered at the more central and eastern town of Mátsaki (Muzaque). During this time Coronado and his comrades in arms were able to reassure and pacify the natives, insomuch that when, two years afterward, they were returning through Zuñiland en route to Mexico from the conquests of the farther Pueblos and their vain search for the golden province of Quivira, they were entreated to remain and join the tribes. But Fray Juan de Padilla, the heroic priest of the expedition, had found more fertile fields to the eastward, and only three or four Mexican Indian allies of the Spaniards were fain to stay.

When, in 1581-'82, Francisco Chamuscado and his 9 soldiers recklessly penetrated those vast and lonely wilds of the southwest (in 1888 I sketched his graven signature and those of many of his successors on El Moro, or the Rock Mesa of Inscriptions, 35 miles east of [327] Zuñi) and passed through the country of Cibola, he was not hindered by its people. And when Antonio de Espejo, in 1582, with scarcely more of a company, was on his way toward Tusayan or the Hopi country, in the northwest, he stopped at the central town of Alona (Hálona) and was well received. To this day the marks, said by the Zuñis to have been made by the "iron bonnets of his tall warriors," are shown on the rafters of one of the low, still used prehistoric rooms facing the great northern court (once the central and main one) of Zuñi, and attest to the hospitality so long ago accorded them there.

Again, in the autumn of 1598, Juan de Oñate and his more considerable force of soldiers and priests, after their general tour of formal conquest in the other Pueblo provinces, were met as they approached the Zuñi towns by delegations of singing priests and warriors, and were received with such showers of white prayer-meal on entering that they had to protect themselves from these offerings, as they supposed, of peace. This incident, and that of the ceremonial hunt and feast given them afterward, signifies conclusively the estimation in which, up to that time, the Spaniards had been held by the priestly elders of Zuñiland. Precisely as the returning Kâ´kâkwe, or mythic-dance dramatists, personating gods and heroes of the olden time are received twice yearly (before and after the harvest growth and time), so were these soldiers and friars received, not as enemies nor as aliens, but as veritable gods or god-men, coming forth at the close of autumn from out the land of day, whence come the ripening breaths of the Frost gods!

As yet, the Franciscan friars, although sometimes baptizing scores of the Zuñi—much to their gratification, doubtless, as quite appropriate behavior on the part of such beings when friendly,—had not antagonized their ancient observances or beliefs; and the warriors who accompanied them had never, since the first of them had come, and after fighting had laid down their dreadful arms and made peace and left hostages, albeit mortals like themselves, with their forefathers—had never again raised their fearful batons of thunder and fire or their long blades of blue metal like lightning.

But all this was soon to change. When, nearly a quarter of a century later still, Fray Alonzo de Benavides became father-custodian of New Mexico, he undertook to establish missions throughout the country. More than twenty missionaries were introduced into the Pueblo provinces by him, and soon afterward Esteban de Perea brought thirty more from Spain and old Mexico. Among the latter were Fray Martin de Arvide and Fray Francisco de Letrado. Fray Letrado was assigned to Zuñi some time after 1628. By the end of the following year the Indians had built for him at Hálona the little Church of the Purification or of the Immaculate Virgin, and at Háwik’uh the church and conventual residence of the Immaculate Conception.

Fray Francisco was an old man and very zealous. Unquestionably, he antagonized the native priests. It is as certain that, at first welcoming [328] him, they gradually came to look upon his religion as no less that of mortal men than their own, and to regard its magic and power of appeal to the gods as of small account in the making of rain or the quelling of war and sorcery. Wherefore, although baptized by dozens as they had been, they brooked but ill the compulsory attendance at mass and other observances and the constant interferences of the father and his soldiers (for a small escort, unluckily, accompanied him) with their own acts of worship. When in the winter of 1630 Fray Martin de Arvide joined Fray Letrado at Háwik’uh, on the way to establish missions among the Zipias, a pueblo people said by the Zuñis to have lived considerably to the southwestward of them at that time, and called by them Tsípiakwe ("People-of-the-coarse-hanging-hair"), he foresaw for his brother and himself speedy martyrdom. He had but fairly departed when, on the Sunday following, the people delayed attending mass, and Fray Francisco, going forth to remonstrate with them, met a party of the native religionists armed with bows and arrows and in mood so menacing that in expectancy of death he knelt where he had stood, clinging to his crucifix, and, continuing to entreat them, was transfixed by many arrows.

Thus speedily was slain the first resident priest of Zuñi; thus were the Zuñis themselves disillusionized of their belief in the more than mortal power of the Spaniard and the deific character of his religion; for they broke up the ornaments of the altar, burned the church, and then sallied forth to follow Fray Martin. They overtook him at night five days later, attacked his party while in camp, overawed and killed outright his two soldiers, and, joined by his traitorous "Christian Indians," one of whom, a half-blood, cut off his hand and scalped him, they killed also this venerable friar and hastened back to their town. There the ceremonial of the scalp dances of initiation were performed over the scalps of the two friars, an observance designed both as a commemoration of victory and to lay the ghosts of the slain by completing the count of their unfinished days and making them members by adoption of the ghostly tribe of Zuñi. The scalp-dance is also supposed to proclaim in song, unto the gods and men, that thenceforward their people are of the enemy, and unto the gods of the enemy that the gods of Zuñi are victors over them, whereof and wherefore it will be well for them to beware. Thus the estimation in which the Spaniard, and especially his religious representatives, were ever afterward to be held was fixed on those fatal days at the close of February, 1630.

Now again, after this demonstration, the Zuñis, as in the days of the great flood, when men had disobeyed the gods, as when Coronado advanced on Háwik’uh, so soon as they had completed the rites of purifying and baptizing the scalps, betook themselves to Thunder mountain and thereon intrenched themselves.

It was not until after two years had passed that they were attacked there, but not overcome, by Tomas de Albizu and his soldiery and [329] induced by the priests who accompanied him, and whom the Indians, knowing them to be unarmed, allowed to approach, to hold parley. It is probable that Don Tomas, finding it impossible to storm their rock successfully, promised that if they would yield the wretched mestizo who had cut off the hand and torn away the scalp of Fray Martin, he and his people would leave them in peace. At any rate, the mutilator of the friar was yielded, and in due course was hanged by the Spanish authorities.

Then gradually the Zuñis descended from their stronghold and a few years later were peacefully reoccupying the largest four of their towns. More than thirty years elapsed before the missions of the Purification at Hálona and the Immaculate Conception at Háwik’uh were reestablished. In 1670 Fray Juan Galdo was the resident priest at the one, and at the other Fray Pedro de Avila y Ayala. But in the autumn of the year named a numerous band of Apache-Navajo attacked the town of Háwik’uh, and, making for the lower courts where stood the church and convent, they dragged Fray Avila from the altar, at which he had sought refuge, clinging to the cross and an image of the Virgin, and, stripping him, beat him to death with one of the church bells at the foot of the cross in the courtyard hard by. They then plundered and burned the church, threw the image of the Virgin into the flames, and, transfixing the body of the priest with more than 200 arrows, cast upon it stones and the carcasses of three dead lambs. The mutilated corpse was thus found the following day by Fray Galdo and carried to Hálona for sepulture in the Church of the Purification there.

After this tragic occurrence the pueblo of Háwik’uh was abandoned by the missionaries and for a short time at least by its native inhabitants as well. Nevertheless, it seems highly probable that other Zuñis, if not indeed some of the townspeople themselves, had to do with the tragic affair just related, for there is no evidence that, although the people of Háwik’uh were numerous, any of them came to the rescue of the father, or that their town was sacked, whereas the church was plundered and burned.

They do not seem, however, to have done injury to the priest of Hálona, for just previously to the summer of 1680 when they, in common with all the other Pueblo Indians, joined in the revolt against Spanish rule and religion, they were tolerating the presence of Fray Juan de Bal at this town and of another priest, it seems, at Háwik’uh.

When the message strands of that great war magician, Popé of Taos, who had planned the rebellion and sent forth the knotted strings of invitation and warning, were received by the Zuñis, their leaders of one accord consented to join the movement and sped the war strands farther on to the Tusayan country, there insisting with the less courageous Hopi that they join also, and ultimately gaining their at first divided consent.

[330] When all the knots had been numbered and untied, then, to a man, the Zuñis arose to slay Spaniards wheresoever they might encounter them. They forthwith killed Fray Juan de Bal, the priest of Hálona, burning his church and destroying the chapels in the lesser towns round about. Not content with this, they dispatched warriors to the Tusayan country to see to it that the Hopi remain faithful to their promise and vigorously to abet them in its fulfilment.

It fared far otherwise with the priest of Háwik’uh. Although his name is unknown, and although it has been doubted that any other missionary than Fray Juan of Hálona was with the Zuñis at the time, or that the mission of Háwik’uh was ever occupied after the death of Fray Pedro de Avila, yet Vetancurt's chronicles are explicit in stating the contrary, and that, although the Church of the Conception was again burned, the priest escaped. This latter statement is substantially true if we may trust Zuñi tradition, which is very detailed on this point, and which is trustworthy on many another and better recorded point of even remoter date.

The elder Priests of the Bow—three of whom were battle-scarred warriors of nearly a hundred winters at the time of my initiation into their order—told me that one of their gray-robed tútatsikwe ("fathers of drink," so named because they used cup-like vessels of water in baptizing), whom their ancients had with them at Háwik’uh in the time of the great evil, was much loved by them; "for, like ourselves," they affirmed, "he had a Zuñi heart and cared for the sick and women and children, nor contended with the fathers of the people; therefore, in that time of evil they spared him on condition "—precisely the rather sweeping condition these same veterans had in 1880 imposed on me ere they would permit of my adoption into one of their clans—"that he eschew the vestment and usages of his people and kind, and in everything, costume and ways of life alike, become a Zuñi; for as such only could they spare him and nurture him." Not so much, I imagine, from fear of death—for the dauntless Franciscan friars of those days feared only God and the devil and met martyrdom as bridegrooms of the Virgin herself—as from love of the Zuñis, if one may judge by the regard they even still have for his memory, and a hope that, living, he might perchance restrain them, alike to the good of their people and his own people, the father gave way to their wishes; or he may have been forced to accede to them by one of those compulsory adoptions of the enemy not uncommonly practiced by the Indians in times of hostility. Be this as it may, the Zuñis abandoned all their towns in the valley, and taking the good priest with them, fled yet again to the top of their high Mountain of Thunder. Around an ample amphitheater near its southern rim, they rebuilt six or seven great clusters of stone houses and renewed in the miniature vales of the mesa summit the reservoirs for rain and snow, and on the crests above the trickling spring under their towns, and along the upper reaches of the giddy trail by which [331] the heights were scaled they reared archers' booths and heaps of slingstones and munitions of heavy rocks.

There, continually providing for the conflict which they knew would sooner or later reach even their remote fastnesses (as speedily it began to reach the Rio Grande country), they abode securely for more than ten years, living strictly according to the ways of their forefathers, worshiping only the beloved of war and the wind and rain, nor paying aught of attention to the jealous gods of the Spaniard.

Then at last Diego de Vargas, the reconquistador of New Mexico, approached Zuñiland with his force of foot soldiers and horsemen. The Zuñis, learning this, poisoned the waters of their springs at Pescado and near the entrance to the valley with yucca juice and cactus spines, and, they say, "with the death-magic of corpse shells; so that the horses and men, drinking there, were undone or died of bloating and bowel sickness." In this latter statement the historians of Vargas and the Zuñi traditions agree. But the captain-general could not have stormed the Rock of Cibola. With the weakened force remaining at his command his efforts were doubly futile. Therefore, where now the new peach orchards of the Zuñis grow on the sunlit sand slopes, 800 feet below the northern crest of the mesa their fathers so well defended in those days, Vargas camped his army, with intent to besiege the heathen renegades, and to harass and pick off such stragglers as came within the range of his arquebuses.

Now, however, the good friar whom the Indians called Kwan Tátchui Lók‘yana ("Juan Gray-robed-father-of-us"), was called to council by the elders, and given a well-scraped piece of deerskin, whitened with prayer meal, and some bits of cinder, wherewith to make markings of meaning to his countrymen. And he was bidden to mark thereon that the Zuñis were good to those who, like him, were good to them and meddled not; nor would they harm any who did not harm their women and children and their elders. And that if such these captains and their warriors would but choose and promise to be, they would descend from their mountain, nor stretch their bowstrings more. But when they told their gray father that he could now join his people if that by so doing he might stay their anger, and told him so to mark it, the priest, so the legend runs, "dissembled and did not tell that he was there, only that the fathers of the Áshiwi were good now;" for he willed, it would seem, to abide with them all the rest of his days, which, alas, were but few. Then the hide was tied to a slingstone and taken to the edge of the mesa, and cast down into the midst of the watchful enemy by the arm of a strong warrior. And when the bearded foemen below saw it fall, they took it up and curiously questioned it with their eyes, and finding its answers perfect and its import good, they instant bore it to their war captain, and in token of his consent, they waved it aloft. So was speech held and peace forthwith established between them.

[332] That without casualty to the Zuñis an understanding was in some way soon reached between them and Vargas, the chroniclers of the expedition agree with this Zuñi legend; and before the end of the century the Indians had all descended to the plain again and were gathered, except in seasons of planting and harvest, chiefly at three of their easternmost towns, and the central one of Hálona Ítiwana, the Zuñi of today. After the reconquest at least some of the missions were rehabilitated, and missionaries dwelt with the Zuñis now and again. But other chiefs than those chosen by the priestly elders of the people were thenceforward chosen by the Spaniards to watch the people—gobernador, alcalde, and tenientes,—and these in turn were watched by Spanish soldiers whose conduct favored little the fostering of good will and happy relations; for in 1703, goaded to desperation by the excesses of these resident police, the Zuñis drove at least three of them into the church and there massacred them. Then, according to their wont, they fled, for the last time, to the top of Thunder mountain.

When they finally descended they planted numerous peach orchards among the cliffs and terraces of Grand mountain and Twin mountains to the northward of Zuñi, and there also laid out great gardens and many little cornfields. And with the pretext of wishing to be near their crops there, they built the seven Sónoli ‘Hlúëlawe (the "Towns of Sonora"), so named because the peach stones they had planted there had been brought from Sonora, Mexico. But their real object was to escape from the irksome and oft-repeated spyings upon and interdictions of their sacred observances and mythic drama-dances, which, as time went on, the Spanish frailes, supported by the increasing power of the authorities at Santa Fé in the first half of the eighteenth century, were wont to make. So, in hidden and lone nooks on the mountains, where their fine foundations may be seen even now, the Indian priests had massive kivas built, and there from year to year they conducted in secret the rites which but for this had never been preserved so perfectly for telling, albeit only in outline, in the following pages. But even thus far from the mission and its warders the plume-wands of worship, which in earlier times had been made long (each one according to its kind as long as from the elbow to the tip of one finger or another of him who made and sacrificed it), now had to be cut short and made only as long as the hands and the various fingers of those who made them; for the large plumed messages to the winds and spaces often betrayed the people, and they must now needs be made of size convenient for burial or hiding away in crannies or under bushes as near as might be to the shrines of the sacred precincts where once the fathers had worshiped so freely.

Toward the end of the century, between 1775 and 1780, the old Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which now harbors only burros and shivering dogs of cold winter nights and is toppling to ruin in [333] the middle of the grand plaza of Zuñi, was built and beautifully decorated with carved altar pieces and paintings, gifts from the King of Spain to the Indies and work of resident monks as well. Its walls were painted—as the more recent plasterings scaling off here and there reveal—by Zuñi artists, who scrupled not to mingle many a pagan symbol of the gods of wind, rain, and lightning, sunlight, storm-dark and tempest, war-bale and magic, and, more than all, emblems of their beloved goddess-virgins of corn-growing with the bright-colored Christian decorations. And doubtless their sedulous teachers or masters, as the case may have been, understanding little, if aught, of the meanings of these things, were well pleased that these reluctant proselytes should manifest so much of zeal and bestow such loving care on this temple of the holy and only true faith.

In a measure the padres were right. The Indians thenceforward did manifest not only more care for the mission, but more readiness to attend mass and observe the various holy days of the church. To be baptized and receive baptismal names they had ever been willing, nay, eager, for they were permitted, if only as a means of identification, to retain their own tik‘ya shíiwe ("names totemic of the sacred assemblies"), which names the priests of the mission innocently adopted for them as surnames and scrupulously recorded in the quaint old leather-covered folios of their mission and church. Thus it chances that in these faded but beautifully and piously indicted pages of a century ago I find names so familiar, so like those I heard given only a few years since to aged Zuñi friends now passed away, that, standing out clearly from the midst of the formal Spanish phrases of these old-time books, they seem like the voices of the dead of other generations, and they tell even more clearly than such voices could tell of the causes which worked to render the Zuñis of those times apparently so reconciled to Spanish teaching and domination.

For it is manifest that when, as the meaning of his name informs us, the chief priest of the Kâ´kâkwe, or mythic drama-dancers of a hundred years ago, entered the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe and was registered as "Feliciano Pautiatzanilunquia" (Páutia Tsani Lúnk’ya), or "Felix Of-the-sacred-dancers-glorious-sun-god-youth," neither he nor any of his attendant clan relatives, whose names are also recorded, thought of renouncing their allegiance to the gods of Zuñi or the ever sacred Kâ´kâ; but that they thought only of gaining the magic of purification and the name-potency of the gods of another people, as well as of securing the sanctification if not recognition of their own gods and priests by these other gods and priests.

That this was so is shown also by the sacred character almost invariably of even the less exalted tribal names they gave. Thus, those belonging not to the priesthood, yet to the "midmost" or septuarchial clans, as "Francisco Kautzitihua" (Káutsitiwa), or "Francis Giver of-the-midmost-dance," and "Angela Kahuitietza" (Káwiti Etsa), or [334] "Angelina Of-the-midmost-dance Little maiden;" and those belonging to yet other clan divisions and the Kâ´kâ, like "Manuel Layatzilunquia" (Laíyatsi Lúnk‘ya), or "Emanuel Of-the-flowing plume Glorious-tall-bearer," and "María Laytzitilutza" (Laítsitilutsa), or "Mary Of-the-soft-flowing-plume Little-bearer;" and, finally, even the least sacred but mythically alegoric clan names, such as "Manuel Layujtigua" (Lá-yúhtiwa) or "Emanuel Plume-of-lightness," a name of the Eagle clan and upper division of the tribe; and "Lucia Jayatzemietza" (Haíya Tsemi Étsa), or "Lucy Of-green-growing-things-ever-thinking Little-maiden," which, alluding to the leaves of growing corn and vines when watched by the young unmarried girls, is one of the Corn or Seed clan names belonging to the southern division. Only very rarely were the colloquial names one hears most often in Zuñi (the sacred and totemic names are considered too precious for common use) given for baptismal registration. I have found but two or three. One of these is written "Estévan Nato Jasti" (Náto Hastiŋ) or "Stephen Old-tobacco," a Navajo sobriquet which, in common with the few others like it, was undoubtedly offered reluctantly in place of the "true and sacred name," because some relative who had recently borne it was dead and therefore his name could not be pronounced aloud lest his spirit and the hearts of those who mourned him be disturbed.

But the presence of these ordinary names evidences no less than that of the more "idolatrous" ones, the uncompromisingly paganistic spirit of these supposedly converted Indians, and the unmodified fashion of their thoughts at the period of their truest apparent allegiance, or at least submission, to the church. Hence I have not hesitated to pause somewhat in the course of this introductory sketch to give these examples in detail, particularly as they evidence not merely the exceeding vitality of the native Zuñi cult, but at the same time present an explanation of the strange spectacle of earnest propagandists everywhere vigilantly seeking out and ruthlessly repressing the native priesthood and their dances and other ceremonials, yet, unconsciously to themselves, solemnizing these very things by their rites of baptism, officially recognizing, in the eyes of the Indians, the very names and titles of the officiators and offices they otherwise persecuted and denounced. It was quite of a piece with all this that during the acts of worship performed in the old church at that time by the Zuñis, whilst they knelt at mass or responded as taught to the mysterious and to them magic, but otherwise meaningless, credo, they scattered in secret their sacred white prayer-meal, and invoked not only the souls of their dead priests—who as caciques or rulers of the pueblo were accorded the distinction of burial in the church, under their very feet—but also, the tribal medicine-plumes and fetiches hidden away under the very altar where stood the archenemy of their religion!

So, in following farther the Spanish history of Zuñi, we need not be surprised that all went well for a while after the completion of the church, [335] and that more than twenty priests were at one time and another resident missionaries of Zuñi. Nor, on the other hand, need we be surprised that when in the early part of the present century these missionaries began to leave the pagan surnames out of their registers giving Spanish names instead—began to suspect, perhaps, the nature of the wall paintings, or for some other reason had them whitewashed away—and sought more assiduously than ever, in the deepest hiding places of the many-storied pueblo, to surprise the native priests at their unholy pagan practices, that the records of baptisms in the old books grew fewer and fewer, and that as the secular power withdrew more and more its support of the clergy, the latter could no longer control their disaffected flock, and that finally the old mission had to be abandoned, never again to be reoccupied save on occasions of the parochial visits of priests resident in far-away Mexican towns or in other Indian pueblos.

Nevertheless, although the old church was thus abandoned and is now utterly neglected, there lingers still with the Indians a singular sentiment for it, and this has been supposed to indicate that they retain some conscious remnant of the faith and teachings for which it once stood.

It is true that the Zuñis of today are as eager as were their forefathers for baptism and for baptismal names additional to their own. But it must be remembered that baptism—the purification of the head by sprinkling or of the face by washing with medicine-water, was a very old institution with this people even before the Spaniards found them. With them anyone being named anew or assuming a new personality or office is invariably sprinkled or washed "that he be the more cleanly revealed and the better recommended in his new guise and character to the gods and spirits" invoked for the occasion, "and thus be constantly recognized by them as their child, named of themselves, and so be made a special recipient of their favor." This custom is observed, indeed, on many occasions, as on reaching puberty or before any great change in life, or before initiation into the sacred societies, as well as both before and after war, and especially before and after performance in the sacred dances. The head and face of every participant in these mythic dramas is washed or sprinkled when he is being painted and masked to represent or to assume the presence and personality of the god for whom he is to act or by whom he is to be possessed.

Thus it may be seen that this custom probably had its rise in the simple and necessary act of washing the face for painting before the performance of any ceremony calling for the assumption of a new rôle, and in the washing away of the paint, when the ordinary condition of life was to be resumed after such performance. Thus, too, it may be seen that baptism as practiced by the early Franciscan missionaries must have seemed not only familiar to the Zuñis, but also eminently proper and desirable on occasion of their accepting the benefits of initiation [336] into what they supposed was the Kâ´kâ, or one of the general sacred societies of these other people. No wonder, then, that when about to be baptized they insisted on giving their own sacred names of the Kâ´kâ, if only as a surety of their full recognition under them in this new Kâ´kâ, no less than under the new names they were about to receive.

It is also true that the Zuñis do not again burn the dead and cast their ashes into the river, nor bury the bodies of the clan elders, or the priests of the tribal septuarchy, in their own houses, as they did ere the time of Coronado, or "under the ladders," as their funereal rituals continue nevertheless to say they do. They bury all, now, in the little strip of consecrated ground out in front of the church; ground already so overfilled with the bones of past generations that never a new grave is made that does not encroach on other graves. Bones lie scattered all about there, rubbish accumulates, the wooden cross in the center of the place is frequently broken, and the mud walls inclosing it are sometimes allowed to fall to the ground. Yet in vain I urged them if only for sanitary reasons to abandon burying their dead there, and inter them in the sand hills to the south of the pueblo. "Alas! we could not," they said. "This was the ground of the church which was the house of our fathers wherein they were buried, they and their children, 'under the descending ladders.' How, if we bury our dead in lone places, may they be numbered with our 'fathers and children of the descending ladders?'"

But far from indicating any lingering desire for "Christian burial," this is a striking example of the real, though not apparent, persistence of their original mortuary customs. For they still ceremonially and ritualistically "burn" their ordinary dead, as did their forefathers when first compelled to bury in the churchyard, by burning some of their hair and personal effects with the customary clan offerings of food and property, and casting the ashes of all into the river; and it matters not where these, who virtually exist no more, but are, in their eyes, consumed and given to the waters, are buried, save that they be placed with the priestly dead of today, as the "children" or ordinary dead were placed with the priestly dead in the days of the "Mísa k‘yakwe" or "Mission-house people." So, too, the priests of today, or the tribal fathers, are still painted with the black of silence over their mouths and the yellow and green of light and life over their eyes and nostrils, as are the gods, and are ritualistically buried "under the ladders," that is, in their own houses, when actually buried in the churchyard. Thus, when the gods are invoked, these, as being demigods, still priests of the beloved, are also invoked, first, as "Fathers and children of the descending ladder," then as souls in the clouds and winds and waters, "Makers of the ways of life." So the whole burial ground of the church is, in the estimation of the Zuñi, a fetich whereby to invoke the souls of the ancestors, the potency of which would be destroyed if disturbed; hence the place is neither cared for nor [337] abandoned, though recognized even by themselves as a "direful place in daylight."

It is much the same with the old church. A few years since a party of Americans who accompanied me to Zuñi desecrated the beautiful antique shrine of the church, carrying away "Our Lady of Guadalupe of the Sacred Heart," the guardian angels, and some of the painted bas-reliefs attached to the frame of the altar. When this was discovered by the Indians, consternation seized the whole tribe; council after council was held, at which I was alternately berated (because people who had come there with me had thus "plundered their fathers' house"), and entreated to plead with "Wasintona" to have these "precious saints and sacred masks of their fathers" returned to them.

Believing at the time that the Indians really reverenced these things as Christian emblems, and myself reverencing sincerely the memory of the noble missionaries who had braved death and labored so many years in the cause of their faith and for the good of these Indians, I promised either to have the original relics returned or to bring them new saints; and I also urged them to join me in cleaning out the old church, repairing the rents in its walls and roof, and plastering once more its rain-streaked interior. But at this point their mood seemed to change. The chiefs and old men puffed their cigarettes, unmoved by the most eloquent appeals I could make, save to say, quite irrelevantly, that I "talked well," and that all my thoughts were good, very good, but they could not heed them.

I asked them if they did not care for their míssa k‘yakwi or mission-house. "Yea, verily," they replied, with fervor. "It was the sacred place of our fathers, even more sacred than were the things taken away therefrom."

I asked if they would not, then, in memory of those fathers, restore its beauty.

"Nay," they replied, "we could not, alas! for it was the míssa-house of our fathers who are dead, and dead is the míssa-house! May the fathers be made to live again by the adding of meat to their bones? How, then, may the míssa-house be made alive again by the adding of mud to its walls?"

Not long afterward there was a furious night storm of wind and rain. On the following morning, great seams appeared in the northern walls of the old building. I called a council of the Indians and urged that since they would not repair the míssa-house, it be torn down; for it might fall over some day and kill the women and children as they passed through the narrow alley it overshadowed, on their way to and from the spring. Again I was told that my words were good, but alas! they could not heed them; that it was the míssa-house of their fathers! How, if they took it away, would the fathers know their own? It was well that the wind and rain wore it away, as time wasted away their fathers' bones. That mattered not, for it was the work of [338] the beloved, whereof they, the fathers, were aware, but for themselves to move it suddenly away, that were worse than the despoiling of the shrine; for it was the house of the fathers, the shrine only a thing thereof, not a thing of the fathers as verily as was the house itself.

From their point of view this reasoning of the Indians was perfectly consistent, based as it was on their belief that the souls of their ancestors were mediators and that their mortal remains and the places and things thereof were means of invoking them, quite as sacrifices are supposed to be, for the time being, the mortal and mediate parts of the gods and spirits to which they have been offered, hence a potent means of invoking them. This is shown much more clearly in the only other instance of seeming reverence for the church that I can pause to give.

The Zuñis are careful to remove all traces of Catholicism, or rather all symbols of the Mexican religion, from their persons or vicinity during the performance of their sacred dances or rites, seeing to it that no Mexican word, even, is ever spoken in the presence of the Kâ´kâ. If a Mexican or anyone suspected of being a Mexican happens to approach their town during a ceremonial, he is met by watchful sentinels and led, no matter what his rank, condition, or haste, to some sequestered room, where, although courteously treated and hospitably entertained without charge, he is securely locked up and rigorously guarded until after the dance or other observance is over. "The fathers of these Mexicans did violence to our fathers," say the Indians in explanation, "when that our fathers of old called the sacred Kâ´kâ. Therefore, in those days our fathers sought to hide the dancers from their eyes. Our fathers come nigh in breath, when now we call the Kâ´kâ, and they aid our songs and prayers to the beloved Gods of Rain and Wind. How, if they see we have departed from their customs, and reveal these things? Then will they be sad at our forgetfulness of their ways, and filled with fear lest these evil people, beholding, do sacrilege to their precious Kâ´kâ, and will flee away, nor aid our songs and prayers for rain, nor our calls for their beloved presence!"

Nevertheless, in autumn, when the harvest is over, one may see the dilapidated little figure of Saint Francis borne about the pueblo on the eve of the "Feast of the Dead;" and one may see here and there candles burning, or such poor substitutes for them as the Indians can get; and here and there also old rosaries and a few brass crucifixes revealed. Before they fell, one heard, as the night wore on, the ancient church bells hammered; and half forgotten, wholly unintelligible phrases of church Latin chanted. But all this is not in memory of a "saint's day," as would seem, or as one would be told were he injudiciously to inquire. It is the feast and drama of the beloved dead of all days past. And whilst the dead of long, very long ago, must first be summoned by means of their ancient relics which best they knew—the tribal medicines and fetiches, and the songs to them belonging—yet the [339] "old ones of the míssa times knew also these things of the míssa; and so, that they be lured near and come not as strangers, but find means of recognition and movement (manifestation) to us, and happily receive our offerings of food to the fire, they must (in place of the summoning songs and drums and rattles) hear the church bells and chants of the Spaniards and see the things which they, perforce, held to most familiarly and with least fear and secrecy in times of festival while yet they lived in daylight."

I need not add that this fully accounts for the contradictory behavior of the Indians in reference to the old church, the burial ground, and other things pertaining to it. The church could not be rebuilt. It had been dead so long that, rehabilitated, it would be no longer familiar to the "fathers" who in spirit had witnessed its decay. Nor could it be taken suddenly away. It had stood so long that, missing it, they would be sad, or might perhaps even abandon it.

The Zuñi faith, as revealed in this sketch of more than three hundred and fifty years of Spanish intercourse, is as a drop of oil in water, surrounded and touched at every point, yet in no place penetrated or changed inwardly by the flood of alien belief that descended upon it. Herein is exemplified anew the tendency of primitive-minded man to interpret unfamiliar things more directly than simply, according to their appearances merely, not by analysis in our sense of the term; and to make his interpretations, no less than as we ourselves do, always in the light of what he already familiarly believes or habitually thinks he knows. Hence, of necessity he adjusts other beliefs and opinions to his own, but never his own beliefs and opinions to others; and even his usages are almost never changed in spirit, however much so in externals, until all else in his life is changed. Thus, he is slow to adopt from alien peoples any but material suggestions, these even, strictly according as they suit his ways of life; and whatever he does adopt, or rather absorb and assimilate, from the culture and lore of another people, neither distorts nor obscures his native culture, neither discolors nor displaces his original lore.

All of the foregoing suggests what might be more fully shown by further examples, the aboriginal and uncontaminated character—so far as a modern like myself can represent it—of the myths delineated in the following series of outlines. Yet a casual visitor to Zuñi, seeing but unable to analyze the signs above noted, would be led to infer quite the contrary by other and more patent signs. He would see horses, cattle and donkeys, sheep and goats, to say nothing of swine and a few scrawny chickens. He would see peach orchards and wheat fields, carts (and wagons now), and tools of metal; would find, too, in queer out-of-the-way little rooms native silversmiths plying their primitive bellows and deftly using a few crude tools of iron and stone to turn their scant silver coins into bright buttons, bosses, beads, and bracelets, which every well-conditioned Zuñi wears; and he would see worn also, [340] especially by the men, clothing of gaudy calico and other thin products of the looms of civilization. Indeed, if one did not see these things and rate them as at first the gifts to this people of those noble old Franciscan friars and their harder-handed less noble Spanish companions, infinitely more pathetic than it is would be the history of the otherwise vain effort I have above outlined; for it is not to be forgotten that the principal of these gifts have been of incalculable value to the Zuñi. They have helped to preserve him, through an era of new external conditions, from the fate that met more than thirty other and less favored Pueblo tribes—annihilation by the better-armed, ceaselessly prowling Navajo and Apache. And for this alone, their almost sole accomplishment of lasting good to the Zuñi, not in vain were spent and given the lives of the early mission fathers.

It is intimated that aside from adding such resources to the tribe as enabled it to survive a time of fearful stress and danger, even the introduction of Spanish plants, animals, and products did not greatly change the Zuñis. This is truer than would at first seem possible. The Zuñi was already a tiller of the soil when wheat and peaches were given him. To this day he plants and irrigates his peach trees and wheat crops much as he anciently planted and watered his corn—in hills, hoeing all with equal assiduity; and he does not reap his wheat, but gathers it as he gathers his corn in the ear. Thus, only the kind of grain is new. The art of rearing it and ways of husbanding and using it remain unchanged. The Zuñi was already a herder when sheep and goats were given him. He had not only extensive preserves of rabbits and deer, but also herds—rather than flocks—of turkeys, which by day were driven out over the plains and mesas for feeding, and at night housed near the towns or in distant shelters and corrals. It is probable that his ancestry had even other domesticated animals. And he used the flesh of these animals as food, their feathers and fur as the materials for his wonderfully knitted, woven, and twilled garments and robes, as he now uses the mutton and goat meat for food, and the wool of the sheep for his equally well-knitted, woven, and twilled, though less beautiful, garments and robes. Thus, only the kinds (and degree of productivity) of the animals are new, the arts of caring for them and modes of using their products, are unchanged. This is true even in detail. When I first went to live with the Zuñis their sheep were plucked, not sheared, with flat strips of band iron in place of the bone spatulæ originally used in plucking the turkeys; and the herders always scrupulously picked up stray flecks of wool—calling it "down," not hair, nor fur—and spinning it, knitting, too, at their long woolen leggings as they followed their sheep, all as their forefathers used ever to pick up and twirl the stray feathers and knit at their down kilts and tunics as they followed and herded their turkeys. Even the silversmiths of Zuñi today work coins over as their ancestors of the stone-using age worked up bits of copper, not only using tools [341] of stone and bone for the purpose but using even the iron tools of the Spaniard mostly in stone-age fashion.[1]

This applies equally to their handling of the hoes, hatchets, and knives of civilized man. They use their hoes—the heaviest they can get—as if weighted, like the wooden and bone hoes of antiquity, vertically, not horizontally. They use their hatchets or axes and knives more for hacking and scraping and chipping than for chopping, hewing, and whittling, and in such operations they prefer working toward themselves to working from themselves, as we work. Finally, their garments of calico and muslin are new only in material. They are cut after the old fashion of the ancestral buckskin breeches and shirts, poncho coats of feathers and fur or fiber, and down or cotton breech clouts, while in the silver rings and bracelets of today, not only the shapes but even the half-natural markings of the original shell rings and bracelets survive, and the silver buttons and bosses but perpetuate and multiply those once made of copper as well as of shell and white bone.

Thus, only one absolutely new practical element and activity was introduced by the Spaniards—beasts of burden and beast transportation and labor. But until the present century cattle were not used natively for drawing loads or plows, the latter of which, until recently being made of a convenient fork, are only enlarged harrowing-sticks pointed with a leaf of iron in place of the blade of flint; nor were carts employed. Burdens were transported in panniers adapted to the backs of burros instead of to the shoulders of men.

The Zuñi is a splendid rider, but even now his longest journeys are made on foot in the old way. He has for centuries lived a settled life, traveling but little, and the horse has therefore not played a very conspicuous part in his later life as in the lives of less sedentary peoples, and is consequently unheard of, as are all new things—including the greatest of all, the white man himself—in his tribal lore, or the folk tales, myths, and rituals of his sacred cult-societies. All this strengthens materially the claim heretofore made, that in mind, and especially in religious culture, the Zuñi is almost as strictly archaic as in the days ere his land was discovered.

If a historic sketch of Spanish intercourse with the Zuñi people indicates that little change was wrought on their native mood by so many years of alien contact, an outline of their pristine history, or a sketch of their growth and formation as a people, will serve yet further to show not only how, but also why, this was so, as well as to explain much in the following outlines of their myths of creation and migration, the meaning of which would otherwise remain obscure.

[342] Linguistically the Zuñi Indians of today stand alone, unrelated, so far as has heretofore been determined, to any other Indians either sedentary, like themselves, or unsettled, like the less advanced peoples of the plains. Nevertheless, although they as yet thus constitute a single linguistic stock, there are present and persistent among them two distinct types of physique and numerous survivals—inherited, not borrowed—of the arts, customs, myths, and institutions of at least two peoples, unrelated at first, or else separate and very diversely conditioned for so long a period of their preunited history that their development had progressed unequally and along quite different lines, at the time of their final coalition. That thus the Zuñis are actually descendants of two or more peoples, and the heirs of two cultures at least, is well shown in their legends of ruins and olden times, and especially in these myths of creation and migration as interpreted by archeologic and ethnographic research.

According to all these tokens and evidences, one branch of their ancestral people was, as compared with the other, aboriginal in the region comprising the present Zuñi country and extending far toward the north, whence at some remoter time they had descended. The other branch was intrusive, from the west or southwest, the country of the lower Rio Colorado, their earliest habitat not so clearly defined and their remoter derivation enigmatical, for they were much more given to wandering, less advanced in the peaceful arts, and their earliest ruins are those of comparatively rude and simple structures, hence scant and difficult to trace, at least beyond the western borders of Arizona. Considering both of these primary or parental stocks of the Zuñi as having been thus so widely asunder at first, the ancestral relations of the aboriginal or northern branch probably ranged the plains north of the arid mountain region of Utah and Colorado ere they sought refuge in the desert and canyons of these territories. Yet others of their descendants, if still surviving, may not unlikely be traced among not only other Pueblos, but also and more distinctly among wilder and remoter branches, probably of the Shoshonean stock. The ancestral relations of the intrusive or western branch, however, were a people resembling the semisettled Yumans and Pimans in mode of life, their ruins combining types of structure characteristic of both these stocks; and if their descendants, other than Zuñis themselves, be yet identified among Yuman tribes, or some like people of the lower Colorado region, they will be found (such of them as survive) not greatly changed, probably, from the condition they were all in when, at a very distant time, their eastward faring kinsfolk, who ultimately became Zuñis, left them there.

It is quite certain that relatives, in a way—not ancestral—of the Zuñis still exist. Not many years before Fray Marcos de Niza discovered Cibola, the Zuñians conquered some small towns of the Keres to the south-southeastward of the Zuñi-Cibola country, and adopted some of the survivors and also some of their ritual-dramas—still performed, [343] and distinctively Keresan in kind—into their own tribe. Previously to that—previously, indeed, to their last and greatest union with the settled people mentioned as the aboriginal Zuñi—a large body of the western branch and their earlier fellows (called in the myths of creation "Our lost others") separated from them in the country south and west of the Rio Puerco and the Colorado Chiquito, and went, not wholly as related in the myths, yet quite, undoubtedly, far away to the southward. I have identified and traced their remains in Arizona toward and into Mexico as far as the coast, and if, as the Zuñis still believe, any of them survive to this day, they are to be looked for lower down in Mexico or in the still farther south, whither, it is said, they disappeared so long ago. But, as before intimated, these relatives (by adoption in the one case, by derivation in the other) were not, strictly speaking, ancestral, and thus are barely alluded to in the myths, and therefore concern us less than do the two main or parental branches.

Of these, the one which contributed more largely in numbers, certain culture characteristics, and the more peaceful arts of life to make the Zuñis what they were at the time of the Spanish conquest, was the aboriginal branch. The intrusive or western branch is, strange to say, although least numerous, the one most told of in the myths, the one which speaks throughout them in the first person; that is, which claims to be the original Shíwi or Zuñi. Of this branch it is unnecessary to say much more here than the myths themselves declare, save to add that it was, if not the conquering, at least, and for a long time, the dominant one; that to it the Zuñis owe their vigor and many, if not most, of their distinguishing traits; and that, coming as they did from the west, they located there, and not in the north, as did all these other Pueblo Indians (including even those whom they found and prevailed over, or were joined by, in the present land of Zuñi), the place where the human family originated, where the ancestral gods chiefly dwell, and whither after death souls of men are supposed to return anon.

According to their own showing in the myths they were, while a masterful people, neither so numerous at the time of their coming, nor so advanced, nor so settled, as were the peoples whom they "overtook" from time to time as they neared the land of Zuñi or the "Middle of the world." They did not cultivate the soil, or, at least, apparently did not cultivate corn to any considerable extent before they met the first of these peoples, for, to use their own words, they were "ever seeking seeds of the grasses like birds on the mesas."

There is abundant reason for supposing that the "elder nations"—these peoples whom they "overtook," the "People of the Dew," the "Black people," and the "Corn people" of the "towns builded round"—were direct and comparatively unchanged descendants of the famous cliff dwellers of the Mancos, San Juan, and other canyons of Utah, Colorado, and northern New Mexico. The evidences of this are numerous and detailed, but only the principal of them need here be examined.

[344] The ruins of these rounded towns of the Corn tribes which Hernando de Alvarado and Fray Juan de Padilla saw in 1540 while going southeastward from Zuñi, are especially characteristic of the Zuñi region, and extend quite generally both southward toward the Rito Quemado and the Salinas in western central New Mexico, and, by way of the Chaco, northward nearly to the Colorado boundary. They are as often half round as they are wholly oblong or circular, and even when completely rounded or oval in outline are usually divided into two semicircular parts by an irregular court or series of courts extending lengthwise through the middle, and thus making them really double villages of the half-round type.

A comparison of the ground plans of these round or semicircular ruins with those of the typical cliff ruins reveals the fact that they were simply cliff towns transferred, as it were, to the level of the open plains or mesa tops. Their outer or encircling walls were, save at the extremities of the courts, generally unbroken and perpendicular, as uninterrupted and sheer, almost, as were the natural canyon walls surrounding to the rearward the older cliff towns to which they thus corresponded and which they apparently were built to replace; and the houses descended like steps from these outer walls in terraced stories, facing, like the seats of an amphitheater, the open courts, precisely as descended the terraced stories of the cliff dwellings from the encircling rock walls of the sheltered ledges or shelves on which they were reared, necessarily facing in the same manner the open canyons below. Thus the courts may be supposed to have replaced the canyons, as the outer walls replaced the cliffs or the back walls built nearest them in the rear of at least the deeper village caves or shelters.

Other structural and kindred features of the cliff towns are found to be equally characteristic of the round ruins, features which, originating in the conditions of building and dwelling in the cliffs, came to be perpetuated in the round towns afterward built on the plains.

So limited was the foothold afforded by the scant ledges or in the sheltered but shallow hollows of the cliffs where the ancient cliff dwellers were at first forced as a measure of safety to take refuge and finally to build, that they had to economize space to the utmost. Hence in part only the women and children, being smaller and more in need of protection than the men, were accommodated with dwelling places as such, the rooms of which were so diminutive that, to account for them, theories of the dwarfish size of the cliff dwellers as a race have been common. As a further measure of economy these rooms were built atop of one another, sometimes to the height of several stories—up, in fact, to the very roof at the rear of the cavern in most cases—and thence they were terraced toward the front in order that light and air might be admitted as directly as possible to each story.

For the double purpose of accommodating the men and of serving as assembly rooms for councils and ceremonial functions, large circular [345] chambers were constructed almost always out in front of the terraced dwelling cells of the women and children, and thus in the more exposed mouths of the caverns or shelters the villages nestled in. These round assembly rooms or kivas were often, indeed, built up from sloping portions of the sheer outer edge of the village cave shelf, in order to be as much as possible on a level with or even below the limited ground space between them and the houses farther back, so that the front along the lower and outermost row of these house cells might remain open and unobstructed to passage.

The dwelling rooms or house cells themselves were made as nearly rectangular as was practicable, for only partitions divided them; but of necessity such as were placed far back toward or against the encircling and naturally curved rock walls, or the rear masonry walls, built in conformity to their curvature in all the deeper caves, had small triangular or keystone-shape spaces between their partitions. These, being too small for occupancy even by children, were used as storerooms for grain and other household supplies. When the cave in which a village was built happened to be very deep, the living rooms could not be carried too far back, as neither light nor sufficient air could reach them there; hence here, chiefly against the rear wall or the cave back itself, were built other storerooms more or less trapezoidal in shape, according to the degree of curvature in the rock face against which they were built, or, as said before, of the rear wall itself, which in the deeper caves often reached from floor to roof and ran parallel to the natural semicircular back of the cavern.

Against the rearward face of such back walls when present (that is, between them and the rear of the cave itself), behind the village proper, if space further permitted, small rooms, ordinarily of one story, or pens, sometimes roofless, were built for the housing of the flocks of turkeys which the cliff dwellers kept. Beyond these poultry houses was still kept, in the deeper village caves, a space, dark and filled with loose soil and rubbish, in which certain of the dead, mostly men, were buried; while other dead were interred beneath the floors of the lowermost rooms, when the soil or sand filled in to level up the sloping rock bottom of the shelter was sufficiently deep to receive them.

A noteworthy peculiarity of the doorways in the upper stories leading toward the rearward storerooms already described was that they were often made T-shape; that is, very narrow at the bottom and abruptly widened at the top. This was done in order to avoid the necessity of making these openings for entrance and egress too large proportionally to the small size of the rooms. Thus, neither were the walls weakened nor were the inmates needlessly exposed to cold; for fuel, even of the lightest kind, was gathered with risk and transported thither with great difficulty, and the use of it was therefore limited to cookery, and yet a person bearing a back load of corn, or other provender might, by stepping first one foot, then the other, through the narrow lower portion [346] of such a doorway, then stooping with his blanket or basket load, pass through without inconvenience or the necessity of unloading.

Nearly all of these features—so suited to, and some of them evidently so unavoidable with, a people building eyrie-like abodes high up on limited sloping ledges in pockets of the cliffs—were, although they were totally unnecessary to the dwellers in the half-round or double half-round towns of the plains, where space was practically unlimited and topographic and other conditions wholly different, nevertheless characteristic of these also.

Not only were the external walls of these old villages of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls of the hollows in the cliffs, but they were continuous. That is, in all the rounded town ruins, except those which seem to have been reconstructed in more recent times, the outer walls were built first as great semicircular inclosures, hollow artificial cliffs, so to say, and afterward the house walls were built up against them inside, not into them, as they would have been had these outer and the inner walls been built up together. Moreover, not only were the ground plans of these towns of the plains semicircular, as though built in conformity with the curved rock walls of hollows in the cliffs in ancestral fashion, but the storerooms were also still tucked away in the little flaring spaces next to these now outer and surrounding walls, instead of being placed near the more convenient entrances fronting the courts. The huts or sheds for the turkeys, too, were placed not in the inclosures of the courts, but against and outside of these external walls of the villages; and while many of the dead were buried, as in the cliff houses, under the floors of the lowermost rooms, others of them, almost always men, and notably victims of war or accident, were still buried out beyond even the turkey huts. So both the turkey huts and some of the graves of these round villages retained the same positions relative to one another and to the "rearward" of the dwellings that had very naturally been given them in the cliff villages; for in these, being behind the houses and in the rear of the caves, they occupied the most protected areas; while in the round villages, being behind the houses, they were thrown quite outside of the villages, hence occupied the most exposed positions, which latter fact would appear inexplicable save by considering it as a survival of cliff-town usage.

The kivas, or assembly rooms of the round villages, were placed generally in front of the houses facing the courts, as of old they had been built in the mouths of the caverns, also in front of the houses facing the canyons. Moreover, they were, although no longer in the way, wholly or in part subterranean, that is, sunk to the level of the court or plaza, as in the cliff towns they had been built (except where crowding rendered it necessary to make them two-storied, as in some cases) up the front slopes only to the height of the general cave floor or of the lowermost house foundations.

[347] Finally, there were no doorways in the lower stories of the rounded villages, the roofs of which were reached by ladders; but in the upper stories there were passages, some of which, although here no longer so needfully small, were still economically fashioned as of old—wide at the top, narrow at the base, like the T-shape granary avenues of the cliff ruins.

The closeness of correspondence of all these features in the round ruins to those in the cliff ruins (features which in the round ruins appear less in place than in at least the older cliff ruins) would seem to justify my conclusion, earlier stated, that the round towns were simply outgrowths of the cliff villages, transplanted, as it were, into the plains; for all of these features, as they occur in the old cliff ruins, can, with but a single exception (that of the circular form of the kivas or assembly chambers, which, as will presently be shown, were survivals of a yet older phase of building), be accounted for as having originated from necessity, whereas in the round ruins they could not have originated even as possible expedients, since they were unsuitable save by having become customary through long usage.

I have reasserted this fact because the theory that all cliff dwellings were but outlying places of refuge or the hunting and farming stations of larger pueblos in their neighborhood, strongly fortified by position in order that the small parties occupying them now and then for longer or shorter seasons might find safe retreat in them, has been advanced quite successfully. As this theory is not unlikely to gain a considerable hearing, it is necessary to demonstrate even more fully the fact that at least the round towns did not give their structural characteristics to such of the northern cliff ruins as resembled them in plan, and that therefore the latter are to be regarded as actual cliff-dweller remains. In the southern portions of New Mexico and Arizona, as on the upper Salado and in canyons of the Sierra Madre, still farther south, all the cliff dwellings and villages were built without reference to the curved forms of the caverns in which they occurred.[2] That is, they rigidly retained the rectangular pueblo form of arrangement characteristic of the larger ruins in the valleys and plains around them. Hence for this and for other reasons they may be regarded as pueblos transferred to the cliffs, such outposts of the larger pueblos of the plains as it is claimed all cliff dwellings were. So, also, as hitherto intimated, many of the later cliff dwellings, even of the north, have rectangular pueblo additions below them in the canyons or above them on the mesas, and some of the village ruins in the cave shelters themselves are almost faithful miniature reproductions in general plan of the large pueblos of the plains near at hand; but in the one case the pueblo additions above and below were comparatively modern, and indicate either that the cliff dwellings they are adjacent to continued [348] to be occupied down to the time of later true pueblo building, or that they were reoccupied from comparatively modern pueblos and that all additions made were constructed according to customary later forms of building. In the other case, that of the rectangular structures in semicircular cave shelters, either a return to cliff dwelling from pueblo dwelling is indicated, or, as with the southern cliff villages, these also were outposts of comparatively modern kinds of pueblos occurring in the neighborhood. Such, for example, was the case with many of the cliff dwellings of the Tsegi or Canyon de Chelly, some of which continued to be occupied long after the more easterly towns of the San Juan were abandoned, and others of which were reoccupied, probably by Tusayan Indians, in comparatively recent time.

The occurrence of sepulchers in or near almost all the San Juan cliff ruins would alone indicate that they were central and permanent homes of the people who built and occupied them. The surviving Pueblo Indians, so far as I am aware, never bury in or near their outlying towns. Invariably the dead are taken to the central pueblo home of the tribe for sepulture, as there only may they become tribal fetiches in the manner I have heretofore indicated, and be properly renounced by the clans of kin at their place of birth and rearing. If, then, all the cliff towns were merely outlying strongholds, no interments of the original inhabitants would be found in them save those of children perchance born and reared in them. In fact, this is precisely the case with some of the towns in question, those above described as manifestly settlements from later true pueblos.

Another feature of the older cliff dwellings is still more significant in this connection—the presence of the kiva; for the kiva or sacred assembly room was never, for mythic and sociologic reasons, built in temporary or outlying settlements. The mere council chamber was sometimes present in these, but the true kiva never, so long as they remained resorts of more central pueblo towns, for each kiva of such a town located a division of the tribe as pertaining to one or another of the quarters or mythic divisions. Hence, as might be expected, in the more southerly cliff dwellings belonging to more recent pueblos no kiva is ever found.

The evidence furnished by the kivas is significant in other ways, for in connection with the above theory the claim has also been advanced that the cliff villages were occupied for only brief periods at best; that they do not, as assumed by me, represent a phase—so much as an incident—in the development of a people. Aside from the linguistic, sociologic, and other evidence I have to offer later on that of not only these kivas, but also of certain other features of the ruins themselves, is decidedly indicative of both long and continuous occupancy; and an examination of this evidence helps to an understanding of the culture growth of the early cliff dwellers as being not that of Pueblos at first, but that of Pueblo ancestry, Pueblos developing.

[349] Occurring in the midst of the greater groups of northern cliff dwellings, no less than somewhat more scatteringly and widely distributed to at least as far south as the middle of Arizona, are remains of cave dwellings of an older type. They are usually lower down in the cliffs, although they once occurred also in the larger and more accessible of the caverns now occupied by later cliff-house remains, underneath or amid which remains they may still in places be traced. These rude and very ancient cave dwellings mark the beginnings of the cliff occupancy. In all essentials they correspond to the modern cave dwellings of the Sierra Madre in Sonora, Mexico, so admirably described by my friend, Dr. Carl Lumholtz, as built and still lived in by the Tarahumári and Tepehuani Indians, who survive either in the state of these first cliff dwellers of the north, or, as is more probable, have naturally and independently resorted to a similar mode of life through stress of similar circumstances.

Like the Tarahumári, these ancient people of the north at first resorted to the caves during only portions of the year—during the inclement season after each harvest, as well as in times of great danger. At other times, and during the hunting, planting, and seed-gathering seasons particularly, they dwelt, as do the Tarahumári, in rancherias, the distinctive remains of which lie scattered near and far on the plateaus and plains or in the wide valleys. But the caves were their central abodes, and the rancherias, frequently shifted, were simply outlying stations such as are the farming hamlets of the modern pueblos.

The earliest of these dwellings in the caves were at first simple huts disposed separately along the rear walls of these recesses in the cliffs. They usually had foundation walls, approximately circular in plan, of dry-laid stones, upon which rested upper converging courses of cross-laid logs and sticks, hexagonal and pen-like covers surmounted, as were the rancherias of the open plains, by more or less high-pitched roofs of thatch—here in the shelters added rather for protection from cold than from storms of rain and snow.

But in course of time, as the people dwelling, when needful, in these secure retreats increased in numbers, and available caves became filled, the huts, especially in the more suitable shelters, were crowded together in each, until no longer built separately, but in irregularly continuous rows or groups at the rear, each divided from others by simple, generally straight, partitions, as are the dwelling divisions of the Tarahumári today. But unlike the latter, these hut-like rooms of the northern cave-dwellers were still rounded outwardly, that is, each hut (where not contiguous to or set in the midst of others, as was the case with those along the front), retained its circular form. The partitions and foundation walls were still built low, and still surmounted by converging cross-laid upper courses of logs or saplings and roofs of thatch. As with the Tarahumári, so with these earliest cliff dwellers of the north; their granaries were far more perfectly constructed than their own abiding [350] places. To adequately protect their store or provision from seed-devouring animals, no less than from the elements, it became necessary to place it in dry crannies or pockets of the cliffs near at hand, preferably in recesses as far back in their caves as possible, and also to seal it up in these natural receptacles. At first (as may be seen in connection with the caves of Las Tusas, Arizona, containing some of the oldest and rudest separate hut remains I have yet examined) the mouths of these receptacles were walled up with dry-laid stones, carefully chinked, and plastered inside with mud, precisely as were the granary pockets of the Havasupai Indians seen by me in 1881. Later, while still the houses continued to be mere low-walled and partitioned sheds or huts of dry masonry, these granaries came to be quite well constructed, of mud-laid walls, and were enlarged, as stores increased with increase of settlement and tillage, until they had to be built outward from the niches like good sized, slightly tapering bins, protruding somewhat from the cave walls, and finally forming, as do the granaries of the Tarahumári today, miniature prototypes of the perfected single cliff house of a far later day.

In times of great danger small children were not infrequently bestowed for safe-keeping in the larger of these little granary rooms in the deepest recesses at the rear of the earliest cave villages, as the finding of their remains without burial token in such situation has attested; and thus the folk tales which modern Pueblos tell of children left in the granary rooms and surviving the destruction or flight of their elders by subsisting on the scant store remaining therein (later to emerge—so the stories run—as great warrior-magicians and deliver their captive elders), are not wholly without foundation in the actual past of their ancestry. It was thus that these first cliff dwellers learned to build walls of stone with mud mortar, and thus, as their numbers increased (through immunity from destruction which, ever better, these cliff holds afforded), the women, who from the beginning had built and owned the granaries, learned also to build contiguously to them, in the depths of the caverns, other granary-like cells somewhat larger, not as places of abode, at first, but as retreats for themselves and their children.

It is not needful to trace farther the development of the cliff village proper into a home for the women and children, which first led to the tucking of storerooms far back in the midst of the houses; nor is it necessary to seek outside of such simple beginnings the causes which first led to the construction of the kivas, always by the men for themselves, and nearly always out in front of the house cells, which led to the retention for ages of the circular form in these kivas and to the survival in them for a long time (as chambers of council and mystery, where the souls of the ancients of men communed in these houses of old with the souls of their children's grandchildren) of the cross-laid upper courses of logs and even the roofings of thatch. Indeed, it is only in some way like this, as survival through slow evolution of archaic structures for worship, [351] that the persistence of all these strange features—the retention for use of the men, the position in front of the houses, the converging hexagonal log wall caps, the unplastered roofing of thatch—until long after the building of houses for everyday use by the women, with walls continuous from floor to ceiling, with flat and mud-plastered roofs and smooth finishing inside and out, manifest themselves.

Of equal significance with this persistency of survival in the kiva, as to both structural type and function, of the earliest cave-dwelling hut-rooms through successively higher stages in the development of cliff architecture, is the trace of its growth ever outward; for in nearly or quite all of the largest cliff ruins, while as a rule the kivas occur, as stated, along the fronts of the houses—that is, farthest out toward the mouths of the caverns—some are found quite far back in the midst of the houses. But in every instance of this kind which I have examined these kivas farthest back within the cell cluster proper are not only the oldest, but in other ways plainly mark the line of the original boundary or frontage of the entire village. And in some of the largest of these ruins this frontage line has thus been extended; that is, the houses have grown outward around and past the kivas first built in front of them, and then, to accommodate increased assemblies, successively built in front of them and in greater numbers, not once or twice, but in some cases as many as three, four, and in one instance five times.

All this makes it plain, I think, that the cave and cliff dweller mode of life was a phase, not an incident merely, in the development of a people, and that this same people in general occupied these same caves continuously or successively for generations—how long it is needless here to ask, but long enough to work up adaptively, and hence by very slow degrees, each one of the little natural hints they received from the circumstances and necessities of their situation in the caves and cliffs into structural and other contrivances, so ingenious and suitable and so far-fetched, apparently, so long used, too, as to give rise to permanent usages, customs, and sociologic institutions, that it has been well-nigh impossible to trace them to such original simple beginnings as have been pointed out in the case of a few of them.

The art remains of both the earliest cave dwellers and of the cliff dwellers exhibit a like continuity of adaptive development; for even where uses of implements, etc., changed with changing conditions, they still show survivals of their original, diverse uses, thus revealing the antecedent condition to which they were adapted.

Moreover, this line of development was, as with the structural features already reviewed, unbroken from first to last—from cave to cliff, and from cliff to round-town conditions of life; for the art remains of the round ruins, of which I recovered large numbers when conducting the excavations of the Hemenway expedition in ruins east of Zuñi, are with scarcely an exception identical, in type at least, with those of the cliff ruins, although they are more highly developed, especially [352] the potteries, as naturally they came to be under the less restricted, more favorable conditions of life in the open plains. Everything, in fact, to be learned of the round-ruin people points quite unmistakably to their descent in a twofold sense from the cliff-dwelling people; and it remains necessary, therefore, only to account for their change of habitat and to set forth their supposed relationship finally to the modern Zuñi pueblos.

In earlier writings, especially in a "Study of Pueblo Pottery,"[3] where the linguistic evidence of the derivation of the Zuñis from cliff-dwelling peoples is to some extent discussed, I have suggested that the prime cause of the abandonment of the cliffs by their ancestry was most probably increase of population to beyond the limits of available building area, and consequent overcrowding in the cliffs; but later researches have convinced me that, although this was no doubt a potent factor in the case and ultimately, in connection with the obvious advantages of life in more accessible dwelling places, led by slow degrees, as the numbers and strength of the cliff villages made it possible, to the building of contiguous pueblos both above their cliffs on the mesas and below them in the valleys, still it was by no means the only or the first cause of removal from these secure strongholds. Nor is it to be inferred from the evidence at hand that the cliff dwellers were ever driven forth from their almost inaccessible towns, either by stress of warfare or by lack of the means of subsistence, as has been so often supposed. On the contrary, it is certain that long after the earliest descents into the plains had been ventured, the cliffs continued to be occupied, at first and for a very long period as the permanent homes of remnant tribes, and later as winter resorts and places of refuge in times of danger for these latter tribes, as well as, perhaps, for their kinsfolk of the plains.

It is by this supposition only that the comparatively modern form of the square and terraced pueblos built contiguously to the latest abandoned of the cliff towns may be explained. For when the cliff dwellers had become numerous enough to be able to maintain themselves to some extent out on the open plains, it has been seen that they did not consider their villages safe and convenient or quite right unless builded strictly, in both general form and the relative arrangement of parts, as had been for many generations their towns in the cliffs—did not, it is reasonable to suppose, know at once how to build villages of any other form. Thus we may confidently regard these round towns as the earliest built by the cliff dwellers after they first left the cliffs.

The direction in which these cavoid or cliff-form or rounded village ruins may be farthest and most abundantly traced, is, as has been said before, to the southward into and through the land of Zuñi as far as the cliffless valleys bordering the Rito Quemado region in southerly central New Mexico, wherein lies the inexhaustible Lake of Salt, which [353] the early Spanish chronicles mention as the possession and source of supply of the "salt in kernels" of the Zuñi-Cibolans.

Not only did a trail (used for such long ages that I have found it brokenly traceable for hundreds of miles) lead down from the cliff-town country to this broad valley of the Lake of Salt, but also there have been found in nearly all the cliff dwellings of the Mancos and San Juan section, whence this trail descends, salt in the characteristic kernels and colors found in this same source of the Zuñi supply.

This salt, as occurring in the cliff ruins, is commonly discovered wrapped in receptacles of corn husk, neatly tied into a trough-like form or pouch by bands of corn-leaf or yucca fiber. These pouches are precisely like the "wraps of the ancients," or packs of corn husk in which the sacred salt is ceremoniously brought home in advance of the cargoes of common salt by the Zuñi priests on each occasion of their annual, and especially of their greater quadrennial, pilgrimages (in June, after the planting) to the Lake of Salt. And it is not difficult to believe that both the packs and the pilgrimages—which latter offer many suggestive features not to be considered here—are survivals of the time when the remoter cliff-dwelling ancestry of the Zuñi Corn tribes ventured once in a period of years to go forth, in parties large enough for mutual protection, to the far-off source of their supply of salt.

Except this view be taken it is difficult to conceive why the "time after planting" should have become so established by the Zuñis (who are but two days' foot-journey from the lake, and visit its neighborhood at other periods of the year on hunting and other excursions) as the only period for the taking of the salt—to take which, indeed, by them or others at any other season, is held to be dire sacrilege.

But to the cliff dwellers and their first descendants of the farther north this period "after the planting" was the only available one of the year; for the journey along their trail of salt must have consumed many days, and been so fraught with danger as to have drawn away a goodly portion of the warrior population who could ill be spared at a later time in the season when the ripening and garnering of the harvest drew back upon the cliff-towns people the bands of predatory savages who annually pillaged their outlying fields, and in terror of whom they for so long a time clung to their refuge in the cliffs.

Additional considerations lead further to the inference not only that the Zuñis inherit their pilgrimages for the salt and the commemorative and other ceremonials which have developed around them directly from the cliff-dweller branch of their ancestry, but also that these latter were led down from the cliffs to build and dwell in their round towns along the trail of salt chiefly, if not wholly, by the desire to at once shorten and render less dangerous their communal expeditions to the Lake of Salt and to secure more exclusive possession thereof.

These two objects were rendered equally and the more desirable by the circumstance, strongly indicated by both the salt remains themselves [354] and by usages surviving among the present Zuñis, that in course of time an extensive trade in salt of this particular variety grew up between the cliff dwellers and more northern and western tribes. When found by the Spaniards the Zuñi-Cibolans were still carrying on an extensive trade in this salt, which for practical as well as assumed mythic reasons they permitted no others to gather, and which they guarded so jealously that their wars with the Keresan and other tribes to the south-southeastward of their country were caused—as many of their later wars with the Navajo have been caused—by slight encroachments on the exclusive right to the products of the lake to which the Zuñis laid claim.

The salt of this lake is superior to any other found in the southwest, not excepting that of the Manzano salinas, east of the Rio Grande, which nevertheless was as strenuously fought for and guarded by the Tanoan tribes settled around these salinas, and had in like manner, indeed, drawn their ancestry down from earlier cavate homes in the northern mountains. Hence it was preferred (as it still is by both Indian and white population of New Mexico and Arizona) to all other kinds, and commanded such price that in the earlier cliff-packs I have found it adulterated with other kinds from the nearer salt marshes which occur in southern Utah and southwestern Colorado. That the adulteration of the lake salt with the slightly alkaline and bitter salt of the neighboring marshes was thus practiced with a view to eking out the trade supply is conclusively shown, I think, by the presence in the same cliff homes from which the adulterated specimens were obtained, of abundant specimens of the unadulterated salt, and this as conclusively shows not only that the cliff dwellers traded in this salt, as do their modern Zuñi representatives, but also that it was then, as now, more highly valued than other kinds of salt in the southwest.

The influence on the movements of whole tribes of people which it is here assumed such a source of favorite salt supply as this exerted over the early cliff dwellers, does not stand alone in the history of American tribes. It already has been intimated that the Tanoans so far prized their comparatively inferior source of salt supply in the salinas of the Manzano as to have been induced to settle there and surround them with a veritable cordon of their pueblos.

Another and far more significant instance, that of the Cerro de Sal in Peru may be mentioned, for in that country not only was salt of various kinds to be found in many valleys and throughout nearly all the deserts of the Medano region extending from northern Ecuador to southern Chili, but the sea also lay near at hand along the entire western border of this vast stretch of country; yet from remote parts of South America trails lead, some from the Amazon and from Argentina, more than a thousand miles away, some from nearer points and from all local directions to this famous "Cerro de Sal." The salt from this locality was, like that of the Lake of Salt, so highly prized that it [355] drew aboriginal populations about it in even pre-Incan days, and was a source of supply, as well as, it is affirmed, of abundant tribute to those dominant Pueblos of South America, the Incas of later days.[4]

That the Lake of Salt, as a coveted source, actually did influence the earlier descents of the cliff dwellers, and did lead to the building and occupancy by them of the long line of ruins I have described, rests, finally, on linguistic no less than on such comparative evidence as has already been indicated. In turn, this leads to consideration of the larger and at present more pertinent evidence that these dwellers in the round towns were in part ancestors of the Zuñis, and that thus, as assumed at the outset, the Zuñis are of composite, at least dual, origin, and that their last, still existing, phase of culture is of dual derivation.

The archaic and sacred name for the south in Zuñi is Álahoïnkwin táhna, but the name more commonly employed—always in familiar or descriptive discourse—is Mák‘yaiakwin táhna (that is, the "direction of the salt-containing water or lake," from ma, salt; k‘yaía, water, or lake-containing or bearing; kwin, place of, and táhna, point or direction of). That this name should have displaced the older form in familiar usage is significant of the great importance attached to their source of salt by the early Zuñis; yet but natural, for the older form, Álahoïnkwin táhna, signifies "in the direction of the home (or source) of the coral shells," from álaho, glowing red shell-stuff; ïnkwïn, abiding place of, or containing place of, and táhna. This source of the álahowe or coral red shells (which are derived from several species of subtropical mollusks, and were so highly prized by the southwestern tribes that the Indians of the lower Colorado traded in them as assiduously as did those of the cliffs and round towns in salt) has been for generations the Gulf of California and the lower coast to beyond Guaymas.

It is not improbable, then, that this archaic and now exclusively ritualistic expression for the southward or the south is a surviving paraphrase of the name for south (or of the source in the south of the red shells), formerly known to the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry, and once familiarly used by them to designate also, perhaps, the direction of the source of their chief treasure (these coral red shells of aboriginal commerce), as in the Gulf of California, which was then south of them, but is now due west-southwestward from them.

What renders this supposition still more probable, and also strengthens the theory of the dual origin of many parallelisms in Zuñi culture, observances, and phraseology, is not so much the fact that this name for red shells and the archaic Zuñi name for red paint, áhona, resemble in sound and meaning the Yuman ahowata, ahauti, etc., for red paint, nor yet the fact that such resemblance extends to many archaic and other terms, for example of relationship in the Zuñi as compared [356] especially with corresponding terms in the Yavapai Tulkepaiya and other dialects of the Yuman. In fact, all the terms in Zuñi for the four quarters are twofold and different, according as used familiarly or ritualistically. That for west, for instance, is in the archaic and ritualistic form, K’yálishiïnkwïn táhna, and signifies "direction of the home, or source of mists and waters, or the sea;" which, when the Zuñi abode in the farther southwest near the Pacific, was the appropriate name for west. But the familiar name for west in modern Zuñi is Súnhakwïn táhna, the "direction of the place of evening," which is today equally appropriate for their plateau-encircled home of the far inland.

"North," in the archaic form, is now nearly lost; yet in some of the more mystic rituals it occurs as both Wímaiyawan táhna (Wíkutaiya is "north" in the Yuma), "direction of the oak mountains," and Yä´lawaunankwin táhna, literally "direction of the place of the mountain ranges," which from the lower Colorado and southern Arizona are toward the north, but from northern Zuñi are not so conspicuous as in the other direction, as, for instance, toward the southwest. On the other hand, if we consider the familiar phrase for north, Pïsh´lankwïn táhna, "direction of the wind-swept plains," or of the "plains of the mightiest winds," to have been inherited from the aboriginal round-town Zuñis, then it was natural enough for them to have named the north as they did; for to the north of their earlier homes in the cliffs and beyond lay the measureless plains where roamed the strong Bison God of Winds, whence came his fierce northern breath and bellowings in the roar of storms in winter.

The east, in common language, signifies "direction of the coming of day;" but in the ritual speech signifies "direction of the plains of daylight"—a literal description of the great Yuma desert as seen at day-break from the Colorado region, but scarcely applicable to the country eastward from Zuñi, which is rugged and broken until the Llanos Estacados of Texas are reached.

The diverse meaning of terms in Zuñi architecture is no less significant of the diverse conditions and opposite directions of derivation of the Zuñi ancestry. If the aboriginal branch of the Zuñi were derived from the dwellers in the northern cliff towns, as has been assumed, then we would expect to find surviving in the names of such structural features of their pueblos as resulted from life in the cliffs linguistic evidence, as in the structures themselves material evidence, of the fact. Of this, as will presently be shown, there is an abundance.

If the intrusive branch of the Zuñi ancestry were, as has also been assumed, of extreme southwestern origin, then we should expect to find linguistic evidence of a similar nature, say, as to the structural modifications of the cliff-dweller and round-town architecture which their arrival at and ultimate position in these towns might lead us to expect to find, and which in fact is to be abundantly traced in later Zuñi ruins, like those of the historic Seven Cities of Cibola.

[357] The conditions of life and peculiarities of building, etc., in the caves and cliffs, then in the round towns, have been commented on at some length in previous pages, and sufficiently described to render intelligible a presentation of this linguistic and additional evidence in regard to derivation from that direction; but it remains for me to sketch, as well as I can in brief, the more significant of such characteristics of the primitive Yuman house and village life as seem to bear on the additional linguistic and other evidence of derivation also from the opposite or Rio Colorado direction, for both clews should be presented side by side, if only for the sake of contrast.

These ancient people of the Colorado region, Yuman or other, had, as their remains show (not in their earliest period, nor yet in a later stage of their development, when a diverging branch of them—"Our lost others"[5]—had attained to a high state of culture in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, but at the time of their migration in part Zuñiward), houses of quite a different type from those of the north. They were mainly rancherias, that is, more or less scattered over the mesas and plains. They were but rarely round, commonly parallelogrammic, and either single or connected in straight L-shape or double L-shape rows. The foundations were of rough stones, designed probably to hold more firmly in place the cane-wattled, mud-plastered stockades which formed the sides and ends as well as (in the house rows) the partitions. They owed their rectangular shapes not to crowding, but to development from an original log-built house type—in the open (like the rancheria house type of the Tarahumári), to which may also be traced their generally greater length than width. They were single storied, with rather flat or slightly sloping roofs, although the high pitched roof of thatch was not wholly unknown, for it was still employed on elevated granaries; but sometimes (this was especially the case with single houses) the stockade posts were carried up above this roof on three sides, and overlaid with saplings on which, in turn, a bower of brush or cane or grass was constructed to protect from the sun rather than from rain. Thus a sort of rude and partial second story was formed, which was reached from below by means of a notched step-log made of a forked or branching tree-trunk, the forks being placed against the edge of the roof proper to keep the log (the butt of which rested on the ground) from turning when being ascended.[6]

Of these single houses the "bowers" described in the following myth of the creation of corn (see page 391), and typically surviving still to a great extent in the cornfield or farm huts of modern Zuñi, may be taken as fair examples; and of the villages or hut-row structures of these ancient plains and valley people, an excellent example may [358] be found in the long-houses of the Mohave and other Yumans of the valley of Colorado river. Both these hut-row houses and the single-room houses were generally surrounded by low walls of loose stone, stone and mud, stockade and mud, or of mud alone; and as often as not one side or the front of a hut within such a wall inclosure was left entirely open.

Thus the outer wall was intended in part as a slight protection from the wind, and probably also to guard from flooding during the sudden showers which sometimes descend in torrents over Arizona plains. They may also have been designed to some extent for protection from the enemy; for these people were far more valiant fighters than their ultimate brethren of the north, and depended for protection less on security of position than on their own prowess. Only during times of unusual danger did they retire to fortified lava buttes (or, when near them, to deep but more or less open crevices in some of the more extensive lava fields), where their hut foundations may be found huddled together within huge inclosures of natural lava blocks, dry laid and irregular, but some of them skillfully planned and astonishingly vast; but in these strongholds they never tarried long enough to be influenced in their building habits sufficiently to change the styles of their hamlets in the plains, for until we reach the point in eastern Arizona where they joined the "elder nations" no change in ground plan of these houses is to be traced in their remains.

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It is necessary to add a few details as to costume, usages, and the institutions of these semisettled yet ever shifting people.

They wore but scant clothing besides their robes and blankets—breech-clouts and kilts, short for the men, long for the women, and made of shredded bark and rushes or fiber; sandals, also of fiber; necklaces of shell beads, and pendent carved shell gorgets. The hair was bobbed to the level of the eyebrows in front, but left long and hanging at the back, gathered into a bunch or switch with a colored cord by the men, into which cord, or into a fillet of plaited fiber, gorgeous long tail feathers of the macaw, roadrunner, or eagle were thrust and worn upright. To the crown of the head of the warriors was fastened a huge bunch of stripped or slitted feathers of the owl or eagle, called, no doubt, then as now by its Yuman name, musema; for it is still known, though used in different fashion, as the múmtsemak‘ya or múmpalok‘ye by the Zuñi Priests of the Bow. The warriors also carried targets or shields of yucca or cotton cord, closely netted across a strong, round hoop-frame and covered with a coarser and larger net, which was only a modification of the carrying net (like those still in use by the Papago, Pima, and other Indians of southern Arizona), and was turned to account as such, indeed, on hunting and war expeditions.

Their hand weapons were huge stone knives and war clubs shaped like potato-mashers, which were called, it would seem, iítekati (their [359] Yuman name) for, although changed in the Zuñi of today, still strikingly survives in familiar speech as the expression ítehk‘ya or ítehk‘yäti, to knock down finally or fatally, and in ceremonial allusion (rather than name) to the old-fashioned and sacred war clubs (which are of identical form) as ítehk‘yatáwe, or knocking-down billets, otherwise called face-smashers or pulpers.

They sometimes buried the dead—chiefly their medicine men and women, or shamans; but all others were burned (with them personal effects and gifts of kin) and their ashes deposited in pots, etc., at the heads of arroyas, or thrown into streams. They held as fetiches of regenerative as well as protective power certain concretionary stones, some of the larger of which were family heirlooms and kept as household gods, others as tribal relics and amulets, like the canopas and huacas of ancient Peru. These nodules were so knobbed, corrugated, and contorted that they were described when seen elsewhere by the early Spanish writers as bezoars, but they were really derived from the sources of arroyas, or mountain torrents, in the beds of which they are sometimes found, and being thus always water-worn were regarded as the seed of the waters, the source of life itself. Hence they were ceremoniously worshiped and associated with all or nearly all the native dances or dramaturgies, of which dances they were doubtless called by their old time possessors "the ancients," or "stone ancients," a name and in some measure a connection still surviving and extended to other meanings with reference to similar fetich stones among the Zuñis of today.

From a study of the remains of these primitive Arizonian ancestors of the Zuñis in the light of present-day Zuñi archaisms, and especially of the creation myths themselves, it would be possible to present a much fuller sketch of them. But that which has already been outlined is sufficiently full, I trust, to prove evidential that the following Zuñi expressions and characteristics were as often derived from this southwestern branch as from the cliff dweller or aboriginal branch of the Zuñi ancestry:

The Zuñi name of an outer village wall is hék‘yapane, which signifies, it would seem, "cliff-face wall;" for it is derived, apparently, from héăne, an extended wall; and ák‘yapane, the face of a wide cliff. Thus it is probably developed from the name which at first was descriptive of the encircling rear wall of a cave village, afterward naturally continued to be applied to the rear but encircling or outside wall of a round town, and hence now designates even a straight outer wall of a village, whether of the front or the rear of the houses.

The name for the outer wall of a house, however, is héine, or héline, which signifies a mud or adobe inclosure; from héliwe, mud (or mud-and-ash) mortar, and úline, an inclosure. Since in usage this refers to the outer wall of a house or other simple structure, but not to that of a town or assemblage of houses, its origin may with equal propriety [360] be attributed to the mud-plastered corral or adobe sides or inclosures of such rancherias as I have already described.[7]

Again, the names in Zuñi, first, for a room of a single-story structure, and, second, for an inner room on the ground floor of such or of a terraced structure, are (1) télitona, "room or space equally inclosed," that is, by four equal or nearly equal walls; and (2) téluline, "room or space within (other rooms or) an inclosure." Both of these terms, although descriptive, may, from their specific use, be attributed to single-story rancheria origin, I think, for in the cliff villages there was no ground-floor room. The name for a lowermost room in the cliff villages still seemingly survives in the Zuñi name for a cellar, which is ápaline, from a, rock, and páloiye, buried in or excavated within; while the cliff name for an upper room or top-story room, óshtenu‘hlane, from óshten, a cave-shelter or cave roof, and ú‘hlane, inclosed by, or built within the hollow or embrace of, also still survives. Yet [361] other examples of diversely derived house-names in this composite phraseology might be added, but one more must suffice. The Zuñi name for a ladder is ‘hlétsilone, apparently from ‘hléwe, slats (‘hléma, slat), and tsilulona, hair, fiber, or osier, entwined or twisted in. This primary meaning of the name would indicate that before the ladder of poles and slats was used, rope ladders were commonly in vogue, and if so, would point unmistakably to the cliffs as the place of its origin; for many of the cliff dwellings can not now be reached save by means of ropes or rope ladders. Yet, although the name for a stairway (or steps even of stone or adobe) might naturally, one would suppose, have been derived from that of a ladder (if ladders were used before stairs, or vice versa if the reverse was the case), nevertheless it has a totally independent etymology, for it is íyechiwe, from íkŏiyächi, forked log or crotch-log, and yéhchiwe, walking or footing-notched; that is, notched step-log or crotch. And this it would seem points as unmistakably to such use of forked and notched step logs or crotch-logs as I have attributed to the rancheria builders, as does the "rope-and-slat" ladder-name to the use of the very different climbing device I have attributed to the cliff dwellers.

It is probable that when the round-town builders had peopled the trail of salt as far from the northward as to the region of Zuñi and beyond, the absence of very deep canyons, containing rock-sheltered nooks sufficiently large and numerous to enable them to find adequate accommodation for cliff villages, gradually led them to abandon all resort to the cliffs for protection—made them at last no longer cliff dwellers, even temporarily, but true Pueblos, or town dwellers of the valleys and plains.

But other influences than those of merely natural or physical environment were required to change their mode of building, and correspondingly, to some extent, their institutions and modes of life from those of round-town builders to those of square-town builders, such as in greater part they were at the time of the Spanish discoveries. In the myths themselves may be found a clew as to what these influences were in that which is told of the coming together of the "People of the Midmost" and these "Dwellers-in-the-towns-builded-round." For there is evidence in abundance also of other kind, and not a little of it of striking force and interest, that this coming together was itself the chief cause of the changes referred to. It has been seen that the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry (who were these "People of the Midmost") were almost from the beginning dwellers in square structures; that their village clusters, even when several of their dwelling places happened to be built together, were, as shown by their remains wherever found, built precisely on the plans of single-house structures—that is, they were simple extensions, mostly rectilinear, of these single houses themselves.

Now peoples like those of the round towns, no less than primitive peoples generally, conceive of everything made, whether structure, [362] utensil, or weapon, as animistic, as living. They conceive of this life of things as they do of the lives of plants, of hibernating animals, or of sleeping men, as a still sort of life generally, but as potent and aware, nevertheless, and as capable of functioning, not only obdurately and resistingly but also actively and powerfully in occult ways, either for good or for evil. As every living thing they observe, every animal, has form, and acts or functions according to its form—the feathered and winged bird flying, because of its feathered form; the furry and four-footed animal running and leaping, because of its four-footed form, and the scaly and finny fish swimming, because also of its fins and scales and form appropriate thereto—so these things made or born into special forms of the hands of man also have life and function variously, according to their various forms.

As this idea of animals, and of things as in other sort animals, is carried out to the minutest particular, so that even the differences in the claws of beasts, for example, are supposed to make the difference between their powers of foot (as between the hugging of the bear and the clutching of the panther), it follows that form in all its details is considered of the utmost importance to special kinds of articles made and used, even of structures of any much used or permanent type. Another phase of this curious but perfectly natural attributive of life and form-personality to material things, is the belief that the forms of these things not only give them power, but also restrict their power, so that if properly made, that is, made and shaped strictly as other things of their kind have been made and shaped, they will perform only such safe uses as their prototypes have been found to serve in performing before them. As the fish, with scales and fins only, can not fly as the duck does, and as the duck can not swim under the water except so far as his feathers, somewhat resembling scales, and his scaly, webbed feet, somewhat resembling fins enable him to do so, thus also is it with things. In this way may be explained better than in any other way, I think, the excessive persistency of form-survival, including the survival of details in conventional ornamentation in the art products of primitive peoples—the repetitions, for instance, in pottery, of the forms and even the ornaments of the vessels, basketry, or what not, which preceded it in development and use and on which it was first modeled. This tendency to persist in the making of well-tried forms, whether of utensil or domicile, is so great that some other than the reason usually assigned, namely, that of mere accustomedness, is necessary to account for it, and the reason I have given is fully warranted by what I know of the mood in which the Zuñis still regard the things they make and use, and which is so clearly manifest in their names of such things. It is a tendency so great, indeed, that neither change of environment and other conditions, nor yet substitution of unused materials for those in customary use for the making of things, will effect change in their forms at once, even though in preserving older forms in this newer sort of material [363] the greatest amount of inconvenience be encountered. There is, indeed, but one influence potent enough to effect change from one established form to another, and that is acculturation; and even this works but slowly and only after long and familiar intercourse or after actual commingling of one people with a diversely developed people has taught them the safety and efficiency of unfamiliar forms in uses familiarly associated with their own accustomed but different forms. Sooner or later such acculturation invariably effects radical change in the forms of things used by one or the other of the peoples thus commingling, or by both; though in the latter case the change is usually unequal. In the case here under consideration there is to be found throughout the nearer Zuñi country ruins of the actual transitional type of pueblo thus formed by the union of the two ancestral branches of the Zuñis, the round town with its cliff-like outer wall merging into the square, terraced town with its broken and angular or straight outer walls; and in these composite towns earliest appears, too, the house wall built into (not merely against) the outer walls of the curved portions no less than into the outer walls of the squared or straight portions.

The composite round and square pueblo ruin is not, however, confined to this transitional type or to its comparatively restricted area wherever occurring, but is found here and there as far northward, for instance, as the neighborhood of older cliff ruins. But in such cases it seems to have been developed, as heretofore hinted, in the comparatively recent rebuilding of old rounded towns by square-house builders. Quite in correspondence with all this is the history of the development, from the round form into the square, of the kivas of the later Zuñi towns; that is, like the towns themselves, the round kivas of the earlier round towns became, first in part and then nearly squared in the composite round and square towns, and finally altogether squared in the square towns. This was brought about by a twofold cause. When the cliff dwellers became inhabitants of the plains, not only their towns, but also the kivas were enlarged. To such an extent, indeed, were the latter enlarged that it became difficult to roof them over in the old fashion of completing the upper courses of the walls with cross-laid logs, and of roofing the narrowed apex of this coping with combined rafter and stick structures; hence in many cases, although the round kiva was rigidly adhered to, it was not unfrequently inclosed within a square wall in order that, as had come to be the case in the ordinary living rooms, rafters parallel to one another and of equal length might be thrown across the top, thus making a flat roof essentially like the flat terrace roofs of the ordinary house structure.

It is not improbable that the first suggestion of inclosing the round kiva in a square-walled structure and of covering the latter with a flat roof arose quite naturally long before the cliff dwellers descended into the plains. It has been seen that frequently, in the larger and longest occupied cliff-towns, the straight-walled houses grew outward wholly [364] around the kivas; and when this occurred the round kiva was thus not only surrounded by a square inclosure—formed by the walls of the nearest houses,—but also it became necessary to cover this inclosing space with a flat roof, in order to render continuous the house terrace in which it was constructed. Still, the practice never became general or intentional in the earlier cliff-towns; probably, indeed, it became so in the now ruined round towns only by slow degrees. Yet it needed after this (in a measure) makeshift beginning only such influence of continued intercourse between the square-house building people and these round-town building people to lead finally to the practical abandonment by the latter of the inner round structure surviving from their old-fashioned kivas, and to make them, like the modern Zuñi kiva, square rather than round.

An evidence that this was virtually the history of the change from the round kiva building to the square kiva building, and that this change was wrought thus gradually as though by long-continued intercourse, is found in the fact that to this day all the ceremonials performed in the great square kivas of Zuñi would be more appropriate in round structures. For example, processions of the performers in the midwinter night ceremonials in these kivas, on descending the ladders, proceed to their places around the sides of the kivas in circles, as though following a circular wall. The ceremonials of concerted invocation in the cult societies when they meet in these kivas are also performed in circles, and the singers for dances or other dramaturgic performances, although arranged in one end or in the corner of the kiva, continue to form themselves in perfect circles; the drum in the middle, the singers sitting around and facing it as though gathered within a smaller circular room inclosed in the square room. Thus it may be inferred, first, from the fact that in the structural details of the scuttles or hatchways by which these modern kivas are entered the cross-logged structure of the inner roof of the earliest cliff kivas survive, and from the additional fact above stated that the ceremonials of these kivas are circular in form, that the square kiva is a lineal descendant of the round one; and second, that even after the round kiva was inclosed in the square room, so to say, in order that its roof might be made as were the roofs of the women's houses, or continuous therewith, it long retained the round kiva within, and hence the ceremonials necessarily performed circularly within this round inner structure became so associated with the outer structure as well, that after the abandonment entirely, through the influences I have above suggested, of these round inner structures, they continued thus to be performed.

As further evidence of the continuity of this development from the earliest to the latest forms, certain painted marks on the walls of the cliff kivas tell not only of their derivation in turn from a yet earlier form, but also and again of the derivation from them of the latest forms. In the ancient ruins of the scattered round houses, which, it is presumed, [365] mark the sites of buildings belonging to the earlier cliff ancestry folk on the northern desert borders, there are discovered the remains of certain unusually large huts, the walls of which appear to have been strengthened at four equidistant points by firmly planted upright logs. It is probable that, alike in this distribution and in the number of these logs, they corresponded almost strictly to the poles of, first, the medicine tent, and, second, the medicine earth lodge. When, in a later period of their development, these builders of the round huts in the north came to be, as has heretofore been described, dwellers in the kivas of the caves, their larger, presumably ceremonial structures, while reared without the strengthening posts referred to, nevertheless contained, as appropriate parts, the marks of them on the walls corresponding thereto. At any rate, in the still later kivas of the cliffs three parallel marks, extending from the tops of the walls to the floors, are found painted on the four sides of the kivas. Finally, in the modern square kiva of Zuñi there are still placed, ceremonially, once every fourth year, on the four sides of the lintels or hatchways, three parallel marks, and these marks are called by the Zuñi in their rituals the holders-up of the doorways and roofs. Many additional points in connection not only with the structural details of, but also in the ceremonials performed within, these modern kivas, may be found, survivals all pointing, as do those above mentioned, to the unbroken development of the kiva, from the earth medicine lodge to the finished square structure of the modern Zuñi and Tusayan Indians.

It likewise has been seen that through very natural causes a strict division between the dwellings of the women and children and of the adult male population of the cliff villages grew up. From the relatively great numbers of the kivas found in the courts of the round towns, it may be inferred that this division was still kept up after the cliff dwellers became inhabitants of the plains and builders of such round towns; for when first the Spaniards encountered the Zuñi dwellers in the Seven Cities of Cibola they found that, at least ceremonially, this division of the men's quarters from those of the women was still persisted in, but there is evidence that even thus early it was not so strictly held to on other occasions. Then, as now, the men became permanent guests, at least, in the houses of their wives, and it is probable that the cause which broke down this previous strict division of the sexes was the union of the western or rancheria building branch of the Zuñi ancestry with the cliff and round-town building branch.

In nothing is the dual origin of the Zuñis so strongly suggested as in the twofold nature of their burial customs at the time when first they were encountered by the Spaniards; for according to some of the early writers they cremated the dead with all of their belongings, yet according to others they buried them in the courts, houses, or near the walls of their villages. It has already been stated that the cliff dwellers buried their dead in the houses and to the rear of their cavern villages, [366] and that, following them in this, the dwellers in the round towns buried their dead also in the houses and to the rear—that is, just outside of their villages. It remains to be stated that nearly all of the Yuman tribes, and some even of the Piman tribes, of the lower Colorado region disposed of their dead chiefly by cremation. Investigation of the square-house remains which lie scattered over the southwestern and central portions of Arizona would seem to indicate that the western branch of the Zuñi ancestry continued this practice of cremating the greater number of their dead. If this be true, the custom on the one hand of cremating the dead, which was observed by Castañeda at Mátsaki, one of the principal of the Seven Cities of Cibola, and the practice of burying the dead observed by others of the earliest Spanish explorers, are easily accounted for as being survivals of the differing customs of the two peoples composing the Zuñi tribe at that time. As has been mentioned in the first part of this introductory, both of these very different customs continued ceremonially to be performed, even after disposal of the dead solely by burial under the influence of the Franciscan fathers came to be an established custom.

In the Kâ´kâ, or the mythic drama dance organization of the Zuñis, there is equal evidence of dual origin, for while in the main the kâ´kâ of the Zuñis corresponds to the katzina of the Rio Grande Pueblo tribes and to the kachina of the Tusayan Indians, yet it possesses certain distinct and apparently extraneous features. The most notable of these is found in that curious organization of priest-clowns, the Kâ´yimäshi, the myth of the origin of which is so fully given in the following outlines (see page 401). It will be seen that in this myth these Kâ´yimäshi are described as having heads covered with welts or knobs, that they are referred to not only as "husbands of the sacred dance" or the "kâ´kâ" (from kâ´kâ and yémäshi, as in óyemäshi, husband or married to) and as the Old Ones or Á‘hläshiwe.

Throughout the Rio Colorado region, and associated with all the remaining ruins of the rancheria builders in central and even eastern Arizona as well, are found certain concretions or other nodular and usually very rough stones, which today, among some of the Yuman tribes, are used as fetiches connected both with water worship and household worship. Among the sacred objects said to have been brought by the Zuñi ancestry from the places of creation are a number of such fetich-stones, and in all the ruins of the later Zuñi towns such fetich-stones are also found, especially before rude altars in the plazas and around ancient, lonely shrines on the mesas and in the mountains. These fetich-stones are today referred to as á‘hläshiwe, or stone ancients, from a, a stone, ‘hlä´shi, aged one, and we, a plural suffix. The resemblance of this name to the Á‘hläshiwe as a name of the Kâ´yemäshi strongly suggests that the nodular shape and knobbed mask-heads of these priest-clowns are but dramatic personifications of these "stone ancients," and if one examine such stones, especially when used [367] in connection with the worship and invocation of torrents, freshets, and swift-running streams (when, like the masks in question, they are covered with clay), the resemblance between the fetich-stones and the masks is so striking that one is inclined to believe that both the characters and their names were derived from this single source. From the fact that this peculiar institution of the clown-priest organization, associated with or, as the Zuñis say, literally married to the Cachina, or Kâ´kâ proper, was at one time peculiarly Zuñi, as is averred by themselves and avowed by all the other Pueblos, it would seem that it was distinctively an institution of the western branch of their ancestry, since also, as the myths declare, these Old Ones were born on the sacred mountains of the Kâ´kâ, on the banks of the Colorado Chiquito in Arizona. Finally, this is typical of many, if not all, features which distinguish the Zuñi Kâ´kâ from the corresponding organizations of other Pueblo tribes.

A complete outline of the mytho-sociologic organization of the Zuñi tribe can not in this connection be undertaken. A sufficient characterization of this probably not unique combination of the sociologic and mythologic institutions of a tribe should, however, be given to make plain certain allusions in the following outlines which it is feared would otherwise be incomprehensible.

The Zuñi of today number scarcely 1,700 and, as is well known, they inhabit only a single large pueblo—single in more senses than one, for it is not a village of separate houses, but a village of six or seven separate parts in which the houses are mere apartments or divisions, so to say. This pueblo, however, is divided, not always clearly to the eye, but very clearly in the estimation of the people themselves, into seven parts, corresponding, not perhaps in arrangement topographically, but in sequence, to their subdivisions of the "worlds" or world-quarters of this world. Thus, one division of the town is supposed to be related to the north and to be centered in its kiva or estufa, which may or may not be, however, in its center; another division represents the west, another the south, another the east, yet another the upper world and another the lower world, while a final division represents the middle or mother and synthetic combination of them all in this world.

By reference to the early Spanish history of the pueblo it may be seen that when discovered, the Áshiwi or Zuñis were living in seven quite widely separated towns, the celebrated Seven Cities of Cibola, and that this theoretic subdivision of the only one of these towns now remaining is in some measure a survival of the original subdivision of the tribe into seven subtribes inhabiting as many separate towns. It is evident that in both cases, however, the arrangement was, and is, if we may call it such, a mythic organization; hence my use of the term the mytho-sociologic organization of the tribe. At any rate, this is [368] the key to their sociology as well as to their mythic conceptions of space and the universe. In common with all other Indian tribes of North America thus far studied, the Zuñis are divided into clans, or artificial kinship groups, with inheritance in the female line. Of these clans there are, or until recently there were, nineteen, and these in turn, with the exception of one, are grouped in threes to correspond to the mythic subdivision I have above alluded to. These clans are also, as are those of all other Indians, totemic; that is, they bear the names and are supposed to have intimate relationship with various animals, plants, and objects or elements. Named by their totems they are as follows:

Kâ´lokta-kwe, Crane or Pelican people; Póyi-kwe (nearly extinct), Grouse or Sagecock people; Tá‘hluptsi-kwe (nearly extinct), Yellow-wood or Evergreen-oak people; Ain̄´shi-kwe, Bear people; Súski-kwe, Coyote people; Aíyaho-kwe, Red-top plant or Spring-herb people; Ána-kwe, Tobacco people; Tâ´a-kwe, Maize-plant people; Tónashi-kwe, Badger people; Shóhoita-kwe, Deer people; Máawi-kwe (extinct), Antelope people; Tóna-kwe, Turkey people; Yä´tok‘ya-kwe, Sun people; Ápoya-kwe (extinct), Sky people; K‘yä´k‘yäli-kwe, Eagle people; Ták‘ya-kwe, Toad or Frog people; K‘yána-kwe (extinct), Water people; Chítola-kwe (nearly extinct), Rattlesnake people; Píchi-kwe, Parrot-Macaw people.

Of these clans the first group of three appertains to the north, the second to the west, the third to the south, the fourth to the east, the fifth to the upper or zenith, and the sixth to the lower or nadir region; while the single clan of the Macaw is characterized as "midmost," or of the middle, and also as the all-containing or mother clan of the entire tribe, for in it the seed of the priesthood of the houses is supposed to be preserved. The Zuñi explanation of this very remarkable, yet when understood and comprehended, very simple and natural grouping of the clans or totems is exceedingly interesting, and also significant whether it throw light on the origin, or at least native meaning, of totemic systems in general, as would at first seem to be the case, or whether, as is more probably the case in this instance, it indicates a native classification, so to say, or reclassification of clans which existed before the culture had been elaborated to its present point. Briefly, the clans of the north—that is, those of the Crane, the Grouse, and Evergreen-oak—are grouped together and are held to be related to the north because of their peculiar fitness for the region whence comes the cold and wherein the season of winter itself is supposed to be created, for the crane each autumn appears in the van of winter, the grouse does not flee from the approach of winter but puts on his coat of white and traverses the forests of the snow-clad mountains as freely as other birds traverse summer fields and woodlands, caring not for the cold, and the evergreen oak grows as green and is as sturdy in winter as other trees are in spring or summer; hence these are totems and in a sense god-beings of the north and of winter, and the clanspeople named after them and [369] considered as, mythically at least, their breath-children, are therefore grouped together and related to the north and winter as are their totems. And as the bear, whose coat is grizzly like the evening twilight or black like the darkness of night, and the gray coyote, who prowls amidst the sagebrush at evening and goes forth and cries in the night-time, and the spring herb or the red-top plant, which blooms earliest of all flowers in spring when first the moisture-laden winds from the west begin to blow—these and the people named after them are as appropriately grouped in the west. The badger, who digs his hole on the sunny sides of hills and in winter appears only when the sun shines warm above them, who excavates among the roots of the juniper and the cedar from which fire is kindled with the fire drill; the wild tobacco, which grows only where fires have burned, and the corn which anciently came from the south and is still supposed to get its birth from the southland, and its warmth—these are grouped in the south. The turkey, which wakes with the dawn and helps to awaken the dawn by his cries; the antelope and the deer, who traverse far mesas and valleys in the twilight of the dawn—these and their children are therefore grouped in the east. And it is not difficult to understand why the sun, the sky (or turkis), and the eagle appertain to the upper world; nor why the toad, the water, and the rattlesnake appertain to the lower world.

By this arrangement of the world into great quarters, or rather as the Zuñis conceive it, into several worlds corresponding to the four quarters and the zenith and the nadir, and by this grouping of the towns, or later of the wards (so to call them) in the town, according to such mythical division of the world, and finally the grouping of the totems in turn within the divisions thus made, not only the ceremonial life of the people, but all their governmental arrangements as well, are completely systemized. Something akin to written statutes results from this and similar related arrangements, for each region is given its appropriate color and number, according to its relation to one of the regions I have named or to others of those regions. Thus the north is designated as yellow with the Zuñis, because the light at morning and evening in winter time is yellow, as also is the auroral light. The west is known as the blue world, not only because of the blue or gray twilight at evening, but also because westward from Zuñiland lies the blue Pacific. The south is designated as red, it being the region of summer and of fire, which is red; and for an obvious reason the east is designated white (like dawn light); while the upper region is many-colored, like the sunlight on the clouds, and the lower region black, like the caves and deep springs of the world. Finally, the midmost, so often mentioned in the following outline, is colored of all these colors, because, being representative of this (which is the central world and of which in turn Zuñi is the very middle or navel), it contains all the other quarters or regions, or is at least divisible into them. Again, each region—at least each of the four cardinal regions, namely, [370] north, west, south, and east—is the home or center of a special element, as well as of one of the four seasons each element produces. Thus the north is the place of wind, breath, or air, the west of water, the south of fire, and the east of earth or the seeds of earth; correspondingly, the north is of course the place of winter or its origin, the west of spring, the south of summer, and the east of autumn. This is all because from the north and in winter blow the fiercest, the greatest winds or breaths, as these people esteem them; from the west early in spring come the moistened breaths of the waters in early rains; from the south comes the greatest heat that with dryness is followed by summer, and from the east blow the winds that bring the frosts that in turn mature the seeds and perfect the year in autumn. By means of this arrangement no ceremonial is ever performed and no council ever held in which there is the least doubt as to the position which a member of a given clan shall occupy in it, for according to the season in which the ceremonial is held, or according to the reason for which a council is convened, one or another of the clan groups of one or another of the regions will take precedence for the time; the natural sequence being, however, first the north, second the west, third the south, fourth the east, fifth the upper, and sixth the lower; but first, as well as last, the middle. But this, to the Zuñi, normal sequence of the regions and clan groups, etc., has been determined by the apparent sequence of the phenomena of the seasons, and of their relations to one another; for the masterful, all conquering element, the first necessity of life itself, and to all activity, is the wind, the breath, and its cold, the latter overmastering, in winter all the other elements as well as all other existences save those especially adapted to it or potent in it, like those of the totems and gods and their children of the north. But in spring, when with the first appearance of the bear and the first supposed growls of his spirit masters in the thunders and winds of that time their breaths begin to bring water from the ocean world, then the strength of the winter is broken, and the snows thereby melted away, and the earth is revivified with drink, in order that with the warmth of summer from the south things may grow and be cherished toward their old age or maturity and perfection, and finally toward their death or sleeping in winter by the frost-laden breaths of autumn and the east.

Believing, as the Zuñis do, in this arrangement of the universe and this distribution of the elements and beings chiefly concerned in them, and finally in the relationship of their clans and the members thereof to these elementary beings, it is but natural that they should have societies or secret orders or cult institutions composed of the elders or leading members of each group of their clans as above classified. The seriation of these secret and occult medicine societies, or, better, perhaps, societies of magic, is one of the greatest consequence and interest. Yet it can but be touched upon here. In strict accordance with succession of the four seasons and their elements, and with their [371] supposed relationship to these, are classified the four fundamental activities of primitive life, namely, as relating to the north and its masterfulness and destructiveness in cold, is war and destruction; relating to the west is war cure and hunting; to the south, husbandry and medicine; to the east, magic and religion; while the above, the below, and the middle relate in one way or another to all these divisions. As a consequence the societies of cold or winter are found to be grouped, not rigidly, but at least theoretically, in the northern clans, and they are, respectively: ’Hléwe-kwe, Ice-wand people or band; Áchia-kwe, Knife people or band; Kâ´shi-kwe, Cactus people or band; for the west: Pí‘hla-kwe, Priesthood of the Bow or Bow people or band (Ápi‘hlan Shiwani, Priests of the Bow); Sániyak‘ya-kwe, Priesthood of the Hunt or Coyote people or band; for the south: Máke‘hlána-kwe, Great fire (ember) people or band; Máketsána-kwe, Little fire (ember) people or band; of the east: Shíwana-kwe, Priests of the Priesthood people or band; Úhuhu-kwe, Cottonwood-down people or band; Shúme-kwe, or Kâ´kâ‘hlána-kwe, Bird-monster people or band, otherwise known as the Great Dance-drama people or band; for the upper region: Néwe-kwe, Galaxy people or band or the All-consumer or Scavenger people or band (or life preservers); and for the lower regions: Chítola-kwe, Rattlesnake people or band, generators (or life makers). Finally, as produced from all the clans and as representative alike of all the clans and through a tribal septuarchy of all the regions and divisions in the midmost, and finally as representative of all the cult societies above mentioned is the Kâ´kâ or Ákâkâ-kwe or Mythic Dance drama people or organization. It may be seen of these mytho-sociologic organizations that they are a system within a system, and that it contains also systems within systems, all founded on this classification according to the six-fold division of things, and in turn the six-fold division of each of these divisions of things. To such an extent, indeed, is carried this tendency to classify according to the number of the six regions with its seventh synthesis of them all (the latter sometimes apparent, sometimes nonappearing) that not only are the subdivisions of the societies also again subdivided according to this arrangement, but each clan is subdivided both according to such a six-fold arrangement and according to the subsidiary relations of the six parts of its totem. The tribal division made up of the clans of the north takes precedence ceremonially, occupying the position of elder brother or the oldest ancestor, as the case might be. The west is the younger brother of this; and in turn, the south of the west, the east of the south, the upper of the east, the under of them all, while the middle division is supposed to be a representative being, the heart or navel of all the brothers of the regions first and last, as well as elder and younger. In each clan is to be found a set of names called the names of childhood. These names are more of titles than of cognomens. They are determined upon by sociologic and divinistic modes, and are [372] bestowed in childhood as the "verity names" or titles of the children to whom given. But this body of names relating to any one totem—for instance, to one of the beast totems—will not be the name of the totem beast itself, but will be names both of the totem in its various conditions and of various parts of the totem, or of its functions, or of its attributes, actual or mythical. Now these parts or functions, or attributes of the parts or functions, are subdivided also in a six-fold manner, so that the name relating to one member of the totem—for example, like the right arm or leg of the animal thereof—would correspond to the north, and would be the first in honor in a clan (not itself of the northern group); then the name relating to another member—say to the left leg or arm and its powers, etc.—would pertain to the west and would be second in honor; and another member—say the right foot—to the south and would be third in honor; and of another member—say the left foot—to the east and would be fourth in honor; to another—say the head—to the upper regions and would be fifth in honor; and another—say the tail—to the lower region and would be sixth in honor; while the heart or the navel and center of the being would be first as well as last in honor. The studies of Major Powell among the Maskoki and other tribes have made it very clear that kinship terms, so called, among other Indian tribes (and the rule will apply no less or perhaps even more strictly to the Zuñis) are rather devices for determining relative rank or authority as signified by relative age, as elder or younger of the person addressed or spoken of by the term of relationship. So that it is quite impossible for a Zuñi speaking to another to say simply brother; it is always necessary to say elder brother or younger brother, by which the speaker himself affirms his relative age or rank; also it is customary for one clansman to address another clansman by the same kinship name of brother-elder or brother-younger, uncle or nephew, etc.; but according as the clan of the one addressed ranks higher or lower than the clan of the one using the term of address, the word-symbol for elder or younger relationship must be used.

With such a system of arrangement as all this may be seen to be, with such a facile device for symbolizing the arrangement (not only according to number of the regions and their subdivisions in their relative succession and the succession of their elements and seasons, but also in colors attributed to them, etc.), and, finally, with such an arrangement of names correspondingly classified and of terms of relationship significant of rank rather than of consanguinal connection, mistake in the order of a ceremonial, a procession or a council is simply impossible, and the people employing such devices may be said to have written and to be writing their statutes and laws in all their daily relationships and utterances. Finally, with much to add, I must be content with simply stating that the high degree of systemization which has been attained by the Zuñis in thus grouping their clans severally and serially about a midmost group, we may see the influence of the coming together of [373] two diverse peoples acting upon each other favorably to the development of both in the application of such conceptions to the conduct of tribal affairs. It would seem that the conception of the midmost, or that group within all these groups which seems to be made up of parts of them all, is inherent in such a system of world division and tribal subdivision corresponding thereto; but it may also well be that this conception of the middle was made more prominent with the Zuñis than with any other of our southwestern peoples through the influence of the earthquakes, which obviously caused their ancestors from the west again and again to change their places of abode, thus emphasizing the notion of getting nearer to or upon the lap or navel of the earth mother, where all these terrific and destructive movements, it was thought, would naturally cease.

Be this as it may, this notion of the "middle" and its relation to the rest has become the central fact indeed of Zuñi organization. It has given rise to the septuarchy I have so often alluded to; to the office of the mortally immortal K‘yäk´lu, keeper of the rituals of creation, from which so much sanction for these fathers of the people is drawn; to the consequent fixing in a series like a string of sacred epics, a sort of inchoate Bible, of these myths of creation and migration; and finally, through all this accumulated influence, it has served to give solidarity to the Zuñi tribe at the time of its division into separate tribes, making the outlying pueblos they inhabited subsidiary to the central one, and in the native acceptation of the matter, mere parts of it.

As the space originally apportioned to this merely preliminary essay on the Myths of Creation has already been greatly exceeded, the consideration even in outline of the cultural characteristics of the Zuñis, which would do much to further illumine the meaning of the myths, must be left to the second paper of the series. This will constitute a key or appendix to the present paper, and will contain such glossaries and detailed explanations as will render, it is hoped, all obscure passages clear, and will at the same time give my authority for framing and translating the myths as I have.

Chiefly, however, it will in turn introduce a third paper on the sacred dances or creation dramas of the Kâ´kâ, which originally the myths themselves (as the source of the songs, rituals, and forms of these dramas) were designed to introduce. Lastly, the whole series are but preliminary to a very extensive work on the subject which I contemplate producing so soon as health and opportunity for further researches among the Zuñis will permit.

As inclusive of the dramaturgies or dances, and nearly all other ceremonials of the Zuñis, this subject of their creation myths is almost inexhaustible. I, at least, can not hope to complete it, and I have [374] therefore chosen to treat it in its relation especially to their so-called dances, particularly to those of the Kâ´kâ.

With other primitive peoples as with the Zuñis, there seems to be no bent of their minds so strong or pervasive of and influential upon their lives as the dramaturgic tendency. That tendency to suppose that even the phenomena of nature can be controlled and made to act more or less by men, if symbolically they do first what they wish the elements to do, according to the ways in which, as taught by their mystic lore, they suppose these things were done or made to be done by the ancestral gods of creation time. And this may be seen in a searching analysis not only of the incidents and symbolisms in folk-tales as well as myths of such primitive peoples, but also in a study of the moods in which they do the ordinary things of life; as in believing that because a stone often struck wears away faster than when first struck it is therefore helpful in overcoming its obduracy to strike it—work it—by a preliminary dramatic and ritualistic striking, whereupon it will work as though already actually worked over, and will be less liable to breakage, etc.

All this and much more to the same effect will be illustrated in the papers which I have mentioned as designed to follow the present one.

There remain still a few points in this preliminary paper which must be commented upon—points regarding my own hand in the work chiefly. I use very freely such terms as "religious," "sacred," "priest," and "god," not because they always express exactly the native meaning, but for the reason that they do so more approximately than any other terms I could select. The fearful and mysterious, the magical and occult, all these and many other elements are usually included in the primitive man's religion, and hence terms like "sacred" must be given a less restricted value than they have in our speech or culture.

Again, while the Zuñi word shíwani, "priest," literally signifies guardian and possessor, as well as maker or keeper of the flesh, or seed of life of the Zuñis, it must not be supposed to represent a medicine-man, shaman, or sorcerer—for all of which there are specific differentiated terms in the Zuñi tongue. Those who bear that title are also divided into four classes, but among all these the functions of possessing a shrine, being ritualists, performing before the altars, and leading as well as ordering all organized sacerdotal ceremonials, is common. Therefore the simple term "priest," in the Pagan rather than in the Christian sense, is the best and truest that can be found.

Frequently I have occasion to reproduce portions of songs or rituals, or, again, words of the Uánami or "Beloved Gods." In the originals these are almost always in faultless blank verse meter, and are often even grandly poetic. I do not hesitate either to reproduce as nearly as possible their form, or to tax to the uttermost my power of expression in rendering the meanings of them where I quote, clear and effective and in intelligible English. Yet in doing this I do not have to depart very far from "scientific" accuracy, even in the linguistic sense.

[375] Finally, I have entitled the originative division of this paper "Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths," because, in the first place, this is but a preliminary rendering of these, and, properly speaking, they are a series of explanation-myths. Now, while such myths are generally disconnected, often, indeed, somewhat contradictory episode-legends with primitive peoples, they are, with the Zuñis, already become serial, and it is in their serial or epic form (but merely in outline) that I here give them. Although each is called a talk, and is held specifically by a particular organization or social division, yet all are called "the speech." This comes about in Zuñi by the presence in the tribal organization, as already explained, of a class of men and priests there called the "Midmost," or the "All," because hereditary in a single clan (the Macaw), yet representative sacerdotally of all the clans and all the priesthoods, which they out-rank as "Masters of the House of Houses."

With them all these various myths are held in brief and repeated in set form and one sequence as are placed the beads of a rosary or on a string, each entire, yet all making a connected strand. Here, then, we see the rudiment or embryo of a sacred epic such as that of the K‘yäk´lu or "Speaker of all times whensoever."

As finally published, this paper will contain the most ample explanation of all these points and many others, and will not ask, as it does today, catholic judgment and charitable interpretation.

The so-called dances of the Zuñis, and presumably those of all similar primitive peoples, are essentially religio-sociologic in character and always at least dramatic, or, more properly speaking, dramaturgic. It follows that to endeavor to describe and treat at all adequately of any one such ceremonial becomes a matter of exceeding difficulty, for it should involve a far more perfect scheme of the sociologic organization as well as at least a general survey of the mythology and religious institutions of the tribe to which it relates, such as I here present, as well as an absolutely searching description of all details in both the preparation for and the performance of such ceremonial.

For example, the celebrated Kâ´kâ or mythic drama-dance organization of the Zuñis, and for that matter all other of their ceremonials, are, any one of them, made up in personnel from specific clans. Thus formed, they are organized, and the actors and their parts divided in accordance with the groupings of these clans in relation to the symbolic regions of the world, or in this case literally septs. Finally, the paraphernalia and costumings, no less than the actions, songs, and rituals, are as distinctly founded on and related to the legend or legends dramatized.

At this point it seems desirable that the sense in which the terms "drama," "dramatic," and "dramaturgic" are employed in relation to these ceremonials be explained. This may best be done, perhaps, by contrasting the drama of primitive peoples, as I conceive it, with that of civilized peoples. While the latter is essentially spectacular, the [376] former has for its chief motive the absolute and faithful reproduction of creative episodes—one may almost say, indeed, the revivification of the ancient.

That this is attempted and is regarded as possible by primitive man is not to be wondered at when we consider his peculiar modes of conception. I have said of the Zuñis that theirs is a science of appearances and a philosophy of analogies. The primitive man, no less than the child, is the most comprehensive of observers, because his looking at and into things is not self-conscious, but instinctive and undirected, therefore comprehensive and searching. Unacquainted as he is with rational explanations of the things he sees, he is given, as has been the race throughout all time, to symbolic interpretation and mystic expression thereof, as even today are those who deal with the domain of the purely speculative. It follows that his organizations are symbolic; that his actions within these organizations are also symbolic. Consequently, as a child at play on the floor finds sticks all-sufficient for the personages of his play-drama, chairs for his houses, and lines of the floor for the rivers that none but his eyes can see, so does the primitive man regard the mute, but to him personified, appliances of his dance and the actions thereof, other than they seem to us.

I can perhaps make my meaning more clear by analyzing such a conception common to the Zuñi mind. The Zuñi has observed that the corn plant is jointed; that its leaves spring from these joints not regularly, but spirally; that stripped of the leaves the stalk is found to be indented, not regularly at opposite sides, but also spirally; that the matured plant is characterized, as no other plant is, by two sets of seeds, the ears of corn springing out from it two-thirds down and the tassels of seeds, sometimes earlets, at the top; also that these tassels resemble the seed-spikes of the spring-grass or pigeon-grass; that the leaves themselves while like broad blades of grass are fluted like plumes, and that amongst the ears of corn ever and anon are found bunches of soot; and, finally, that the colors of the corn are as the colors of the world—seven in number. Later on it may be seen to what extent he has legendized these characteristics, thus accounting for them, and to what extent, also, he has dramatized this, his natural philosophy of the corn and its origin. Nothing in this world or universe having occurred by accident—so it seems to the Zuñi mind,—but everything having been started by a personal agency or supernal, he immediately begins to see in these characteristics of the corn plant the traces of the actions of the peoples in his myths of the olden time. Lo! men lived on grass seeds at first, but, as related in the course of the legends which follow, there came a time when, by the potencies of the gods and the magic of his own priests or shamans, man modified the food of first men into the food of men's children. It needed only a youth and a maiden, continent and pure, to grasp at opposite sides and successively the blades of grass planted with plumes of supplication, and walking [377] or dancing around them, holding them firmly to draw them upward until they had rapidly grown to the tallness of themselves, then to embrace them together. Behold! the grasses were jointed where grasped four times or six according to their tallness; yea, and marked with the thumb-marks of those who grasped them; twisted by their grasp while circling around them and leaved with plume-like blades and tasseled with grass-like spikes at the tops. More wonderful than all, where their persons had touched the plants at their middles, behold! new seed of human origin and productive of continued life had sprung forth in semblance of their parentage and draped with the very pile of their generation. For lo! that when the world was new all things in it were k‘yaíuna, or formative, as now is the child in the mother's womb or the clay by the thoughts of the potter. That the seed of seeds thus made be not lost it needed that Paíyatuma, the God of Dew and the Dawn, freshen these new-made plants with his breath; that Ténatsali, the God of Time and the Seasons, mature them instantly with his touch and breath; that Kwélele, the God of Heat, ripen them with the touch of his Fire-brother's torch and confirm to them the warmth of a life of their own. Nevertheless, with the coming of each season, the creation is ever repeated, for the philosophy of ecclesiasticism is far older than ecclesiastics or their writings, and since man aided in the creation of the corn, so must he now ever aid in each new creation of the seed of seeds. Whence the drama of the origin of corn is not merely reenacted, but is revived and reproduced in all its many details with scrupulous fidelity each summer as the new seed is ripening. And now I may add intelligibly that the drama of primitive man is performed in an equally dramaturgic spirit, whether seen, as in its merely culminating or final enactment, or unseen and often secret, as in its long-continued preparations. In this a given piece of it may be likened to a piece of Oriental carving or of Japanese joinery, in which the parts not to be seen are as scrupulously finished as are the parts seen, the which is likewise characteristic of our theme, for it is due to the like dramaturgic spirit which dominates even the works, no less than the ceremonials, of all primitive and semiprimitive peoples.

So also it seems to the Zuñi that no less essential is it that all the long periods of creation up to the time when corn itself was created from the grasses must be reproduced, even though hastily and by mere signs, as are the forms through which a given species in animal life has been evolved, rapidly repeated in each embryo.

The significance of such studies as these of a little tribe like the Zuñis, and especially of such fuller studies as will, it is hoped, follow in due course, is not restricted to their bearing on the tribe itself. They bear on the history of man the world over. I have become convinced that they thus bear on human history, especially on that of human culture growth, very directly, too, for the Zuñis, say, with all their strange, apparently local customs and institutions and the lore thereof, are [378] representative in a more than merely general way of a phase of culture through which all desert peoples, in the Old World as well as in the New, must sometime have passed. Thus my researches among these Zuñis and my experimental researches upon myself, with my own hands, under strictly primitive conditions, have together given me insight and power to interpret their myths and old arts, as I could never otherwise have hoped to do; and it has also enlarged my understanding of the earliest conditions of man everywhere as nothing else could have done.

The leisure for this long continued research has been due to the generosity, scientific disinterestedness, and personal kindness of my former chief, Professor Spencer F. Baird, and of my present revered director, Major J. W. Powell, whose patience and helpfulness through years of struggle, ill-health, and delay could not adequately be repaid by even the complete carrying out of the series of works herein projected and prefaced. To them and to Professor W. J. McGee, who has aided and fostered this work in every possible way, I owe continual gratitude.

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Before the beginning of the new-making, Áwonawílona (the Maker and Container of All, the All-father Father), solely had being. There was nothing else whatsoever throughout the great space of the ages save everywhere black darkness in it, and everywhere void desolation.

In the beginning of the new-made, Áwonawílona conceived within himself and thought outward in space, whereby mists of increase, steams potent of growth, were evolved and uplifted. Thus, by means of his innate knowledge, the All-container made himself in person and form of the Sun whom we hold to be our father and who thus came to exist and appear. With his appearance came the brightening of the spaces with light, and with the brightening of the spaces the great mist-clouds were thickened together and fell, whereby was evolved water in water; yea, and the world-holding sea.

With his substance of flesh (yépnane) outdrawn from the surface of his person, the Sun-father formed the seed-stuff of twain worlds, impregnating therewith the great waters, and lo! in the heat of his light these waters of the sea grew green and scums (k’yanashótsiyallawe) rose upon them, waxing wide and weighty until, behold! they became Áwitelin Tsíta, the "Four-fold Containing Mother-earth," and Ápoyan Tä´chu, the "All-covering Father-sky."

From the lying together of these twain upon the great world-waters, so vitalizing, terrestrial life was conceived; whence began all beings of earth, men and the creatures, in the Four-fold womb of the World (Áwiten Téhu‘hlnakwi).

Thereupon the Earth-mother repulsed the Sky-father, growing big and sinking deep into the embrace of the waters below, thus separating from the Sky-father in the embrace of the waters above. As a woman forebodes evil for her first-born ere born, even so did the Earth-mother forebode, long withholding from birth her myriad progeny and meantime seeking counsel with the Sky-father. "How," said they to [380] one another, "shall our children, when brought forth, know one place from another, even by the white light of the Sun-father?"

Now like all the surpassing beings (píkwaiyin áhâi) the Earth-mother and the Sky-father were ‘hlímna (changeable), even as smoke in the wind; transmutable at thought, manifesting themselves in any form at will, like as dancers may by mask-making.

Thus, as a man and woman, spake they, one to the other. "Behold!" said the Earth-mother as a great terraced bowl appeared at hand and within it water, "this is as upon me the homes of my tiny children shall be. On the rim of each world-country they wander in, terraced mountains shall stand, making in one region many, whereby country shall be known from country, and within each, place from place. Behold, again!" said she as she spat on the water and rapidly smote and stirred it with her fingers. Foam formed, gathering about the terraced rim, mounting higher and higher. "Yea," said she, "and from my bosom they shall draw nourishment, for in such as this shall they find the substance of life whence we were ourselves sustained, for see!" Then with her warm breath she blew across the terraces; white flecks of the foam broke away, and, floating over above the water, were shattered by the cold breath of the Sky-father attending, and forthwith shed downward abundantly fine mist and spray! "Even so, shall white clouds float up from the great waters at the borders of the world, and clustering about the mountain terraces of the horizons be borne aloft and abroad by the breaths of the surpassing of soul-beings, and of the children, and shall hardened and broken be by thy cold, shedding downward, in rain-spray, the water of life, even into the hollow places of my lap! For therein chiefly shall nestle our children mankind and creature-kind, for warmth in thy coldness."

Lo! even the trees on high mountains near the clouds and the Sky-father crouch low toward the Earth-mother for warmth and protection! Warm is the Earth-mother, cold the Sky-father, even as woman is the warm, man the cold being!

"Even so!" said the Sky-father; "Yet not alone shalt thou helpful be unto our children, for behold!" and he spread his hand abroad with the palm downward and into all the wrinkles and crevices thereof he set the semblance of shining yellow corn-grains; in the dark of the early world-dawn they gleamed like sparks of fire, and moved as his hand was moved over the bowl, shining up from and also moving in the depths of the water therein. "See!" said he, pointing to the seven grains clasped by his thumb and four fingers, "by such shall our children be guided; for behold, when the Sun-father is not nigh, and thy terraces are as the dark itself (being all hidden therein), then shall our children be guided by lights—like to these lights of all the six regions turning round the midmost one—as in and around the midmost place, where these our children shall abide, lie all the other regions of space! Yea! and even as these grains gleam up from the [381] water, so shall seed-grains like to them, yet numberless, spring up from thy bosom when touched by my waters, to nourish our children." Thus and in other ways many devised they for their offspring.

Anon in the nethermost of the four cave-wombs of the world, the seed of men and the creatures took form and increased; even as within eggs in warm places worms speedily appear, which growing, presently burst their shells and become as may happen, birds, tadpoles or serpents, so did men and all creatures grow manifoldly and multiply in many kinds. Thus the lowermost womb or cave-world, which was Ánosin téhuli (the womb of sooty depth or of growth-generation, because it was the place of first formation and black as a chimney at night time, foul too, as the internals of the belly), thus did it become overfilled with being. Everywhere were unfinished creatures, crawling like reptiles one over another in filth and black darkness, crowding thickly together and treading each other, one spitting on another or doing other indecency, insomuch that loud became their murmurings and lamentations, until many among them sought to escape, growing wiser and more manlike.

Then came among men and the beings, it is said, the wisest of wise men and the foremost, the all-sacred master, Póshaiyaŋk‘ya, he who appeared in the waters below, even as did the Sun-father in the wastes above, and who arose from the nethermost sea, and pitying men still, won upward, gaining by virtue of his (innate) wisdom-knowledge issuance from that first world-womb through ways so dark and narrow that those who, seeing somewhat, crowded after, could not follow, so eager were they and so mightily did they strive with one another! Alone, then, he fared upward from one womb (cave) to another out into the great breadth of daylight. There, the earth lay, like a vast island in the midst of the great waters, wet and unstable. And alone fared he forth dayward, seeking the Sun-father and supplicating him to deliver mankind and the creatures there below.

Then did the Sun-father take counsel within himself, and casting his glance downward espied, on the great waters, a Foam-cap near to the Earth-mother. With his beam he impregnated and with his heat incubated the Foam-cap, whereupon she gave birth to Úanam Achi Píahkoa, the Beloved Twain who descended; first, Úanam Éhkona, the Beloved Preceder, then Úanam Yáluna, the Beloved Follower, Twin brothers of Light, yet Elder and Younger, the Right and the Left, like to question and answer in deciding and doing. To them the [382] Sun-father imparted, still retaining, control-thought and his own knowledge-wisdom, even as to the offspring of wise parents their knowingness is imparted and as to his right hand and his left hand a skillful man gives craft freely surrendering not his knowledge. He gave them, of himself and their mother the Foam-cap, the great cloud-bow, and for arrows the thunderbolts of the four quarters (twain to either), and for buckler the fog-making shield, which (spun of the floating clouds and spray and woven, as of cotton we spin and weave) supports as on wind, yet hides (as a shadow hides) its bearer, defending also. And of men and all creatures he gave them the fathership and dominion, also as a man gives over the control of his work to the management of his hands. Well instructed of the Sun-father, they lifted the Sky-father with their great cloud-bow into the vault of the high zenith, that the earth might become warm and thus fitter for their children, men and the creatures. Then along the trail of the sun-seeking Póshaiyaŋk‘ya, they sped backward swiftly on their floating fog-shield, westward to the Mountain of Generation. With their magic knives of the thunderbolt they spread open the uncleft depths of the mountain, and still on their cloud-shield—even as a spider in her web descendeth—so descended they unerringly, into the dark of the under-world. There they abode with men and the creatures, attending them, coming to know them, and becoming known of them as masters and fathers, thus seeking the ways for leading them forth.

Now there were growing things in the depths, like grasses and crawling vines. So now the Beloved Twain breathed on the stems of these grasses (growing tall, as grass is wont to do toward the light, under the opening they had cleft and whereby they had descended), causing them to increase vastly and rapidly by grasping and walking round and round them, twisting them upward until lo! they reach forth even into the light. And where successively they grasped the stems ridges were formed and thumb-marks whence sprang branching leaf-stems. Therewith the two formed a great ladder whereon men and the creatures might ascend to the second cave-floor, and thus not be violently ejected in after-time by the throes of the Earth-mother, and thereby be made demoniac and deformed.

Up this ladder, into the second cave-world, men and the beings crowded, following closely the Two Little but Mighty Ones. Yet many fell back and, lost in the darkness, peopled the under-world, whence they were delivered in after-time amid terrible earth shakings, becoming the monsters and fearfully strange beings of olden time. Lo! in this second womb it was dark as is the night of a stormy season, but larger of space and higher than had been the first, because it was nearer the navel of the Earth-mother, hence named K’ólin tehuli (the Umbilical-womb, or the Place of Gestation). Here again men and the beings [383] increased and the clamor of their complainings grew loud and beseeching. Again the Two, augmenting the growth of the great ladder, guided them upward, this time not all at once, but in successive bands to become in time the fathers of the six kinds of men (the yellow, the tawny gray, the red, the white, the mingled, and the black races), and with them the gods and creatures of them all. Yet this time also, as before, multitudes were lost or left behind. The third great cave-world, whereunto men and the creatures had now ascended, being larger than the second and higher, was lighter, like a valley in starlight, and named Áwisho tehuli—the Vaginal-womb, or the Place of Sex-generation or Gestation. For here the various peoples and beings began to multiply apart in kind one from another; and as the nations and tribes of men and the creatures thus waxed numerous as before, here, too, it became overfilled. As before, generations of nations now were led out successively (yet many lost, also as hitherto) into the next and last world-cave, Tépahaian tehuli, the Ultimate-uncoverable, or the Womb of Parturition.

Here it was light like the dawning, and men began to perceive and to learn variously according to their natures, wherefore the Twain taught them to seek first of all our Sun-father, who would, they said, reveal to them wisdom and knowledge of the ways of life—wherein also they were instructing them as we do little children. Yet like the other cave-worlds, this too became, after long time, filled with progeny; and finally, at periods, the Two led forth the nations of men and the kinds of being, into this great upper world, which is called Ték’ohaian úlahnane, or the World of Disseminated Light and Knowledge or Seeing.

Eight years made the span of four days and four nights when the world was new. It was while yet such days and nights continued that men were led forth, first in the night, that it might be well. For even when they saw the great star (móyächun ‘hlána), which since then is spoken of as the lying star (mókwanosona), they thought it the Sun himself, so burned it their eyeballs! Men and the creatures were nearer alike then than now: black were our fathers the late born of creation, like the caves from which they came forth; cold and scaly their skins like those of mud-creatures; goggled their eyes like those of an owl; membranous their ears like those of cave-bats; webbed their feet like those of walkers in wet and soft places; and according as they were elder or younger, they had tails, longer or shorter. They crouched when they walked, often indeed, crawling along the ground like toads, lizards and newts; like infants who still fear to walk straight, they crouched, as before-time they had in their cave-worlds, that they might not stumble and fall, or come to hurt in the uncertain light thereof. And when the morning star rose they blinked excessively as they beheld its [384] brightness and cried out with many mouth-motionings that surely now the Father was coming; but it was only the elder of the Bright Ones, gone before with elder nations and with his shield of flame, heralding from afar (as we herald with wet shell scales or crystals) the approach of the Sun-father! And when, low down in the east the Sun-father himself appeared, what though shrouded in the midst of the great world waters, they were so blinded and heated by his light and glory that they cried out to one another in anguish and fell down wallowing and covering their eyes with their bare hands and arms. Yet ever anew they looked afresh to the light and anew struggled toward the sun as moths and other night creatures seek the light of a camp fire; yea, and what though burned, seek ever anew that light!

Thus ere long they became used to the light, and to this high world they had entered. Wherefore, when they arose and no longer walked bended, lo! it was then that they first looked full upon one another and in horror of their filthier parts, strove to hide these, even from one another, with girdles of bark and rushes; and when by thus walking only upon their hinder feet the same became bruised and sore, they sought to protect them with plaited soles (sandals) of yucca fiber.

It was thus, by much devising of ways, that men began to grow knowing in many things, and were instructed by what they saw, and so became wiser and better able to receive the words and gifts of their fathers and elder brothers, the gods, Twain and others, and priests. For already masters-to-be were amongst them. Even in the dark of the under-worlds such had come to be; as had, indeed, the various kinds of creatures-to-be, so these. And according to their natures they had found and cherished things, and had been granted gifts by the gods; but as yet they knew not the meaning of their own powers and possessions, even as children know not the meanings and right uses of the precious or needful things given them; nay nor yet the functions of their very parts! Now in the light of the Sun-father, persons became known from persons, and these things from other things; and thus the people came to know their many fathers among men, to know them by themselves or by the possessions they had.

Now the first and most perfect of all these fathers among men after Póshaiyaŋk‘ya was Yanáuluha, who brought up from the under-world water of the inner ocean, and seeds of life-production and growing things; in gourds he brought these up, and also things containing the "of-doing-powers."

He who was named Yanáuluha carried ever in his hand a staff which now in the daylight appeared plumed and covered with feathers [385] of beautiful colors—yellow, blue-green, and red, white, black, and varied. Attached to it were shells and other potent contents of the under-world. When the people saw all these things and the beautiful baton, and heard the song-like tinkle of the sacred shells, they stretched forth their hands like little children and cried out, asking many questions.

Yanáuluha, and other priests (shiwanáteuna) having been made wise by teaching of the masters of life (god-beings) with self-magic-knowing (yam tsépan ánikwanan), replied: "It is a staff of extension, wherewith to test the hearts and understandings of children." Then he balanced it in his hand and struck with it a hard place and blew upon it. Amid the plumes appeared four round things, seeds of moving beings, mere eggs were they, two blue like the sky or turkis; two dun-red like the flesh of the Earth-mother.

Again the people cried out with wonder and ecstasy, and again asked they questions, many.

"These be," said he who was named Yanáuluha, "the seed of living things; both the cherishers and annoyancers, of summer time; choose ye without greed which ye will have for to follow! For from one twain shall issue beings of beautiful plumage, colored like the verdure and fruitage of summer; and whither they fly and ye follow, shall be everlastingly manifest summer, and without toil, the pain whereof ye ken not, fields full fertile of food shall flourish there. And from the other twain shall issue beings evil, uncolored, black, piebald with white; and whither these two shall fly and ye follow, shall strive winter with summer; fields furnished only by labor such as ye wot not of shall ye find there, and contended for between their offspring and yours shall be the food-fruits thereof."

"The blue! the blue!" cried the people, and those who were most hasty and strongest strove for the blue eggs, leaving the other eggs for those who had waited. "See," said they as they carried them with much gentleness and laid them, as one would the new-born, in soft sand on the sunny side of a cliff, watching them day by day, "precious of color are these; surely then, of precious things they must be the seed!" And "Yea verily!" said they when the eggs cracked and worms issued, presently becoming birds with open eyes and with pinfeathers under their skins, "Verily we chose with understanding, for see! yellow and blue, red and green are their dresses, even seen through their skins!" So they fed the pair freely of the food that men favor—thus alas! cherishing their appetites for food of all kinds! But when their feathers appeared they were black with white bandings; for ravens were they! And they flew away mocking our fathers and croaking coarse laughs!

And the other eggs held by those who had waited and by their father Yanáuluha, became gorgeous macaws and were wafted by him with a toss of his wand to the far southward summer-land. As [386] father, yet child of the macaw, he chose as the symbol and name of himself and as father of these his more deliberate children—those who had waited—the macaw and the kindred of the macaw, the Múla-kwe; whilst those who had chosen the ravens became the Raven-people, or the Kâ´kâ-kwe.

Thus first was our nation divided into the People of Winter and the People of Summer. Of the Winter those who chose the raven, who were many and strong; and of the Summer those who cherished the macaw, who were fewer and less lusty, yet of prudent understanding because more deliberate. Hence, Yanáuluha their father, being wise, saw readily the light and ways of the Sun-father, and being made partaker of his breath, thus became among men as the Sun-father is among the little moons of the sky; and speaker to and of the Sun-father himself, keeper and dispenser of precious things and commandments, Pékwi Shíwani Éhkona (and Earliest Priest of the Sun). He and his sisters became also the seed of all priests who pertain to the Midmost clan-line of the priest-fathers of the people themselves "masters of the house of houses." By him also, and his seed, were established and made good the priests-keepers of things.

The Twain Beloved and priest fathers gathered in council for the naming and selection of man-groups and creature-kinds (tánawe), spaces, and things. Thus determined they that the creatures and things of summer and the southern space pertained to the Southern people, or Children of the Producing Earth-mother; and those of winter and northern space, to the Winter people, or Children of the Forcing or Quickening Sky-father.

Of the Children of Summer, some loved and understood most the Sun, hence became the fathers of the Sun people (Yä´tok’ya-kwe). Some loved more the water, and became the Toad people (Ták‘ya-kwe), Turtle people (Étâa-kwe), or Frog people (Ták‘yaiuna-kwe), who so much love the water. Others, again loved the seeds of earth and became the People of Seed (Tâatém‘hlanah-kwe), such as those of the First-growing grass (Pétâa-kwe, now Aíyaho-kwe), and of the Tobacco (Ána-kwe). Yet still others loved the warmth and became the Fire or Badger people (Tónashi-kwe). According, then, to their natures and inclinations or their gifts from below or of the Masters of Life, they chose or were chosen for their totems.

Thus, too, it was with the People of Winter or the North. They chose, or were chosen and named, according to their resemblances or aptitudes; some as the Bear people (Aíŋshi-kwe), Coyote people (Súski-kwe), or Deer people (Shóhoita-kwe); others as the Crane people (Kâ´lokta-kwe), Turkey people (Tóna-kwe) or Grouse people (Póyi-kwe). [387] In this wise it came to pass that the Áshiwe were divided of old in such wise as are their children today, into ánotiwe (clans or kinties) of brothers and sisters who may not marry one another, but from one to another of kin. Yea, and as the Earth-mother had increased and kept within herself all beings, cherishing them apart from their father even after they came forth, so were these our mothers and sisters made the keepers of the kin-names and of the seed thereof, nor may the children of each be cherished by any others of kin.

Now the Beloved Foremost Ones (Úan Éhkon Áteona) of these clans were prepared by instruction of the gods and the fathers of the house of houses and by being breathed of them (púak‘yanapk‘ya), whereby they became áshiwani or priests also, but only the priests of possession, master keepers of sacred things and mysteries (tíkitlapon ámosi), each according to his nature of kinship. It was thus that the warmth-wanting (ték‘yä‘hlna shema) Badger-people were given the great shell (tsúlikéinan ‘hlana), the heart or navel of which is potent or sensitive of fire, as of the earthquake and the inner fire is the coiled navel of the Earth-mother. On the sunny sides of hills burrow the badgers, finding and dwelling amongst the dry roots whence is fire. Thus the "Two Badgers" were made keepers of the sacred heart-shell (súti k’ili achi), makers and wardens of fire. So, too, were the Bear, Crane, and Grouse people given the múetone, or the contained seed-substance of hail, snow and new soil (for the bear sleeps, no longer guarding when winter comes, and with the returning crane, in the wake of the duck, comes winter in the trail of the white growing grouse). So, to the Toad and other water people, descended to them from Yanáuluha the k‘yáetone, or the contained seed-substance of water; and to the Átâa-kwe, or All-seed-people, especially to the First-growing-grass people and the Tobacco people, was given of him also, the chúetone, or the contained seed-substance of corn grains.

Now when the foremost ones of more than one of these kin clans possessed a contained or sacred seed-substance, they banded together, forming a society for the better use and keeping of its medicine and its secret (forbidden) mysteries, and for the guidance and care thereby of their especial children. Thus, leading ones of the Bear people, Crane people, and Grouse people became the ‘Hléetâ-kwe, or Bearers of the Ice-wands as they are sometimes called, whose prayers and powers bring winter, yet ward off its evils to the flesh and fearsomeness to the soul. But at first, only four were the bands of priest-keepers of the mysteries: Shíwana-kwe, or the Priesthood of Priest people; Sániak‘ya-kwe, or the Priesthood of the Hunt, who were of the Coyote, Eagle, and Deer kin, Keepers of the Seed-substance of Game; Áchiak‘ya-kwe, [388] or the Great Knife people, makers and defenders of pathways for the people; and Néwe-kwe, keepers of magic medicines and knowledge invincible of poison and other evil, whose first great father was Paíyatuma, God of Dew and the Dawn, himself. Out of these and of other clans were formed in later days by wisdom of the Father of Medicines and Rites (the great Póshaiyaŋk‘ya, when he returned, all as is told in other talk of our olden speech) all other societies, both that of the Middle, and the Twain for each of all the other six regions (tem‘halatékwiwe,) the Tabooed and Sacred Thirteen. But when all was new, men did not know the meanings of their possessions, or even of the commandments (haítoshnawe); even as children know not the prayers (téusupénawe). These they must first be taught, that in later days, when there is need therefor, they may know them and not be poor.

As it was with men and the creatures, so with the world; it was young and unripe (k‘yaíyuna). Unstable its surface was, like that of a marsh; dank, even the high places, like the floor of a cavern, so that seeds dropped on it sprang forth, and even the substance of offal became growing things.

Earthquakes shook the world and rent it. Beings of sorcery, demons and monsters of the under-world fled forth. Creatures turned fierce, becoming beasts of prey, wherefore others turned timid, becoming their quarry; wretchedness and hunger abounded, black magic, war, and contention entered when fear did into the hearts of men and the creatures. Yea, fear was everywhere among them, wherefore, everywhere the people, hugging in dread their precious possessions, became wanderers they, living on the seeds of grasses, eaters of dead and slain things! Yet still, they were guided by the Two Beloved, ever in the direction of the east, told and taught that they must seek, in the light and under the pathway of the Sun, the middle of the world, over which alone could they find the earth stable, or rest them and bide them in peace.

When the tremblings grew stilled for a time, the people were bidden to gather and pause at the First of Sitting-places, which was named K’éyatiwankwi (Place of upturning or elevation). Yet still poor and defenseless and unskilled were the children of men, still moist and ever-anon unstable the world they abode in. Still also, great demons and monsters of prey fled violently forth in times of earthquake (ánukwaík‘yanak‘ya) and menaced all wanderers and timid creatures. Therefore the Beloved Twain took counsel one with the other and with [389] the Sun-father, and instructed by him, the elder said to the younger, "Brother, behold!

"It were well," said the younger, ever eager, and forthwith they made ready as they had between themselves devised. Then said the elder to the younger,

Dread was the din and stir. The heights staggered and the mountains reeled, the plains boomed and crackled under the floods and fires, and the high hollow-places, hugged of men and the creatures, were black and awful, so that these grew crazed with panic and strove alike to escape or to hide more deeply. But ere-while they grew deafened and deadened, forgetful and asleep! A tree lighted of lightning burns not long! Presently thick rain fell, quenching the fires; and waters washed the face of the world, cutting deep trails from the heights downward, and scattering abroad the wrecks and corpses of stricken things and beings, or burying them deeply. Lo! they are seen in the mountains to this day; and in the trails of those fierce waters cool rivers now run, and where monsters perished lime of their bones (áluwe—calcareous nodules in malpais or volcanic tuff) we find, and use in food stuff! Gigantic were they, for their forms little and great were often burned or shriveled and contorted into stone. Seen are these, also, along the depths of the world. Where they huddled together and were blasted thus, their blood gushed forth and flowed deeply, here in rivers, there in floods; but it was charred and blistered and blackened by the fires, into the black rocks of the lower mesas (ápkwina, lava or malpais). There were vast plains of dust, ashes and cinders, reddened as is the mud of a hearth-place. There were great banks of clay and soil burned to hardness—as clay is when baked in the kiln-mound,—blackened, bleached or stained yellow, gray, red, or white, streaked and banded, bended or twisted. Worn and broken by [390] the heavings of the under-world and by the waters and breaths of the ages, they are the mountain-terraces of the Earth-mother, "dividing country from country!" Yet many were the places behind and between these—dark canyons, deep valleys, sunken plains—unharmed by the fires, where they swerved or rolled higher—as, close to the track of a forest-fire, green grow trees and grasses, and even flowers continue to bloom. Therein, and in the land sheltered by the shield, tarried the people, awakened, as from fearful dreams. Dry and more stable was the world now, less fearsome its lone places; since, changed to rock were so many monsters of prey (some shriveled to the size of insects; made precious as amulets for the hunter and warrior, as told in other talks of our ancient speech).

But ever and anon the earth trembled anew in that time, and the people troubled.

"Thus, being, it is not well," said the Two. "Let us again seek the Middle." So, they led their myriads far eastward and tarried them at Tésak‘ya Yäla (Place of nude mountains).

Yet soon again the world rumbled, and again they led the way into a country and place called Támëlan K‘yaíyawan (Where tree boles stand in the midst of the waters). There the people abode for long, saying (poor people!) "This is the Middle!" Therefore they built homes. At times they met people who had gone before, thus learning much of ways in war, for in the fierceness that had entered their hearts with fear, they deemed it not well, neither liked they to look upon strangers peacefully. And many strange things also were learned and happened there, that are told in other speeches of the ancient talk.

Having fought and grown strong, lo! when at last the earth groaned and the conches sounded warning, and the Twain bade them forth, forsooth! they murmured much, and many (foredoomed!), turned headstrong and were left to perish miserably in their own houses as do rats in falling trees, or flies in forbidden food!

But the greater company went obediently forward, until at last they neared Shípololon K‘yaía (Steam mist in the midst of the waters). Behold! they saw as they journeyed, the smoke of men's hearth-fires and a great assemblage of houses scattered over the hills before them! And when they came closer they met dwellers in those places, nor looked peacefully upon them—having erstwhile in their last standing-place, [391] had touch of war—but challenged them rudely, to know, forsooth, who they were and why there.

"We are the People of Seed," said these strangers, replying to our fathers of old, "born elder brothers of ye, and led of the gods!"

"Nay," contended our fathers, "verily, we are led of the gods and of us are the Seed people and the substance of seed whereof our wise elders carry the potencies." Whereupon they grew yet more angry, so dark were they of understanding!

The people who called themselves "Of the Seed"—who were none others than the "Drinkers of the Dew of Grasses"—bade them pause. "Behold!" said they, "we have powers above yours, yet without your aid we can not exert them; even as the mothers of men may not be fertile save of the fathers. Ye are our younger brothers, for verily so are your People of Seed, and more precious than they know, are they and their sacred keepings, ye—unwittingly, alack!—so boast of; even as we are more wise than ye are and in ourselves quickening withal, for ye are, like virgins, unthinking, yet fertile. Now go to! Let us look peacefully upon one another. Do ye, therefore, try first your powers with the sacred things ye carry according as ye have been instructed or may best devise; then will we according to our knowledge of these things and our own practices try our powers with them also, showing forth our customs unto you."

At last, after much wrangling and council, the people agreed to this. And they set apart the time, eight days (as now days are numbered) wherein to make their preparations, which was well; for therefrom resulted to them great gain, yea, and the winning of these stranger villagers, and by wise and peaceful acts rather than by war and the impetuosity of right hands. In the borders of the plain in the midst of cedars (fuel furnishers of the food-maturing fire, these!) and under the shade of Hemlocks (Tree-goddesses of the food-growing water, these!) they encamped. And at the foot of the Hemlocks, facing the sunlight, they builded them of cedar boughs a great bower: like to it, only lesser, are those whence we watch and foster the ripening of our corn; for from their bower thus fashioned, our fathers and mothers, the priests and priest-matrons of old, watched and labored for the first birth of corn, and in this wondrous wise, as young parents watch for the birth of their children, though not knowing of what kind or favor they will be, nevertheless expectantly of heart; and as we now watch the fulfilment of our harvests.

So, the seed-priests and master-keepers of the possessions, and their fathers (those of the house of houses) fasted and intently contemplated their sacred substances to divine the means thereof. And it seemed good to them to cut wands of the spaces, painting them [392] significantly and pluming them in various ways with the feathers of the cloud and summer sun-loving birds (Ólowik‘ya Wówe Pékwi Áshiwani), thinking thereby to waft the breath of their prayers and incantations (taught of the Surpassing Ones all in the new time of the world) and to show forth their meanings even so far as unto the ancient sitting spaces of those who first taught them.

When all else was prepared, they made a shrine around their múetone (or medicine seed of hail and soil) their k‘yáetone (or medicine seed of the water and rain) and their chúetone (or medicine seed of grains). And around these, and reaching out toward the Sun before them, they set their plumed wands of message. For the plain was dry and barren, and they wanted fresh soil by the hail torrents, moisture by the rain, and growth of seed-substance, that they might the better exhibit their powers to these strangers; if perchance, in response to their labors and beseechings, these things would be vouchsafed them. Therefore, that the meaning of their beseechings might be the more plain and sure of favor, certain ones of the sage priests, sought out and placed the largest and most beautifully colored grass seeds they could find among the stores of their way-farings, in the gourd with the chúetone, and then cut from branches of the easy growing cottonwood and willow, gleaned from the ways of water, goodly wands which they plumed and painted, like in color to each kind of seed they had selected; yellow, green, red, white, black, speckled, and mottled; one for each side of the sacred gourd, one to be laid upon it, one to be laid under it, and one to be placed within it; and as soon as finished, thus they disposed the wands.

Now when night came, these master-priests took the chúetone—all secretly, whilst the others were drowsy—and carried it, with the plumed wands they had made, out into the plain, in front of the bower. There they breathed into these things the prayers and over them softly intoned the incantations which had been taught them in the new time of the world. Then they placed the chúetone on the ground of the plain and on each side of it, by the light of the seven great stars which were at that time rising bright above them, they planted one of the plumed wands with the seeds of its color; first, the brightest, yellow with the yellow grass seeds, on the north; then the blue with the green grass seeds, on the west; then the red with the red seeds, to the south, and the white with the white seeds to the east; but the other three plumed wands they could not plant, one above, the other below, and the last within the gourd; so looking at the stars they saw how that they were set, four of them as though around a gourd like their own, and three others as though along its handle! "Há! Chukwé!" said they. "'Tis a sign, mayhap, of the Sky-father!" whereupon they set each of the others in a line, the black one with its seeds of black, nearest to the sacred gourd below the handle; the speckled one with its spotted seeds next, on the other side of the handle, and the mottled one with its [393] dappled seeds far out at the end of the handle, that it might (being of the colors of all the others) point out each of them, as it were, and lead them all!

And when, on the morrow, the watchers saw the plumes standing there all beautiful in the plain, and asked who planted them, and for what, the priests replied, "Verily they were planted in the night, while ye heedlessly drowsed, by the seven stars." Thereat the people, mistaking their meaning, exclaimed, "Behold! the seed wands of the stars themselves!" and they joyed in the omen that their prayers had been heard so far. And lo! during the eight days and nights there arose thick mists, hail and rain descended until torrents poured down from the mountains bringing new soil and spreading it evenly over the plain. And when on the morning of the ninth day the clouds rolled away, "Eluu!" shouted our fathers of the Seed kin to the stranger people; "Water and new soil bring we, where erst was barren hardness; yea, even grasses, tall and plumed as were our wands, and spiked with seed, for the grass seed had sprouted and the new wands taken root and grown, and now had long feathery blades and tall, tasseled stems, waving in the wind."

"Yea, verily!" cried the People of the First-growing-grass kin (Aik‘yaho-kwe), chief of the clans of Seed, "we are the People of the Seed!"

But the strangers, heeding not their boastings, replied, "Yea, verily, enough! It is well! Truly water and new soil ye have brought, and grasses growing great therefrom, yet ye have not brought forth new life therefor of the flesh of men or the seed of seeds! Come now, let us labor together, in order that what ye have begun may be perfected. New soil and the seed of its production, the seed of water, yea even the substance of seed itself we had not, yet of the seed of seed we are verily the people, and our maidens are the mothers thereof, as ye shall see."

Then they, too, set apart eight days, during which to prepare for their custom, and they further said, "That we may be perfect in the plenishing and generation of the seed of seeds, send us forth, O, ye comers, a youth of the kin of Water and of those who hold possession of the precious k‘yáetone, which give unto us likewise, that we join it to the chúetone ye have placed in the midst of the growing plants, according to our understanding of its meaning and relation. And let the youth be goodly and perfect and whole of seed."

Therefore the fathers of the people chose forth, it is said, Yápotuluha, of the clans of Water, foster child of the great Sun-priest Yanáuluha, and named of him. And into his hand they gave the k‘yáetone and certain of their wands of worship, and sent him to the strangers glorious to look upon. Now there were in the village of the stranger Seed people seven maidens, sisters of one another, virgins of one house, and foster children of Paíyatuma (the God of Dew) himself. And they were surpassingly beautiful, insomuch so that they [394] were likened to the seven bright stars and are sung of in the songs of the Seed people and told of in their stories. They, too, were chosen and breathed upon by all the fathers and matrons of the Seed, and with the youth Yápotuluha, instructed in the precious rites and incantations of their custom. And during all the time of preparation rain fell as before, only gently and warm, and on the eighth day the matrons and fathers led the maidens and youth, all beautifully arrayed, down into the plain before the bower where watched the people and grew the grasses. And there they danced and were breathed of the sacred medicine seeds. All through the night backward and forward danced they to the song line of the elders, and in accordance therewith by the side of the growing plants, motioning them upward with their magic wands and plumes, as we, with implements of husbandry, encourage the growth upward of the corn plants today. As time went on, the matron of the dance led the youth and the first maiden apart, and they grasped, one on either side, the first plants, dancing around them, gently drawing them upward as they went, even as the Two Beloved had caused to grow the canes of the under-world. So also did the youth and each maiden in turn grasp the other plants in their turn, until all had grown to the tallness of themselves and were jointed where they had grasped them; yea, and leaved as with waving plumes of the macaw himself. And now, in the night, the keepers of the great shells (of the Badger kin), brought forth fire with their hands from roots, and kindled it in front of the bower toward the east, that its heat might take the place of the Sun and its light shine brightly on the dancers, making their acts verily alive; and as the dawn approached, the youth and first maiden were led apart as before by the Mother-making matron, and together embraced the first of the full grown plants, and so, in turn, the youth and each of the other maidens embraced the other plants.

And as they embraced the first plant, the fire flamed brightly, with the first catching and flush of the wood, and yellow was its light; and as they embraced the second plant, the flames were burning smokily with the fuller grasping of the wood, and blue was the light; and as they were embracing the third plant, the fire reached its fullness of mastery over the wood, and red was its light; and as they were embracing the fourth plant, the fire was fumeless and triumphant over the wood, and white was its light; and as they were embracing the fifth plant, the fire gave up its breath in clouds of sparks, and streaked, of many colors, was its light; and as they were embracing the sixth plant, the fire swooned and slept, giving more heat, as 'twere, than light, thus somber was the light, yet, as they were embracing the seventh plant, it wakened afresh, did the fire, in the wind of the morning, and glowed as does the late fire of the wanderer, with a light of all the colors.

Now, when the day dawned, lo! where the mid-persons of the youth and the maidens had touched most unitedly and warmly the plants, [395] new parts appeared to the beholders, showing, through their coverings, many colors, soft hair shrouding them, as if to make precious their beauty.

Whilst the people still gazed at these, wondering, out from the Eastland came Paíyatuma and Ténatsali of the All-colored flowers (God of the Seasons), followed by Kwélele with his flame-potent fire-wand. Paíyatuma touched the plants with the refreshing breath of his flute; Ténatsali with the flesh-renewing breath of his flowers; Kwélele, with the ripening breath of his torch, whereby the new parts were hardened, some to fruitfulness; others, being too closely touched, burned to the very heat of generative warmth, unfruitful in itself, but fruitful making! Then, as Paíyatuma waved his flute, lo! following Ténatsali, the maidens and the attendant Kwélele went forth and disappeared in the mist of the morning. As they vanished, Paíyatuma turned to where, full in the light of the rising sun, stood the seven plants. Lithe and tall stood he there beside them like a far journeyer, and said to the awed watchers:

As the people eagerly looked, the mists of the morning were seen to be clearing away, and gone within them, even as his voice, was Paíyatuma!

"Thanks this day," together said the fathers and their people, as they looked upon the plants before them, then at the stranger people. "Verily, ye are our elder brothers, and as children and sisters, yea as our very mothers, will we cherish thy maidens and the substance of their flesh!"

"Yea," replied these other Seed people, "eating thereof, ye shall become in very truth our younger brothers! For even as the father hath said, these be the product of our hands joined with thine in labor, [396] and of our hearts joined with thine in sacred thought." Then the ancient of the People of Dew stood in place of Paíyatuma, and spake:

"Thus, of the substance of all flesh is the seed of seeds, Corn! And suited to all peoples and places; yet we, brothers younger are with ye, favored in the light, in that together we are its priests and keepers. Let us therefore love it and cherish it, as we cherish and love our women; and it shall be the giver of milk to the youthful and of flesh to the aged, as our women folk are the givers of life to our youth and the sustainers of life in our age; for of the mother-milk of the Beloved Maidens it is filled, and of their flesh the substance. Eating thereof, thy youth shall grow strong and handsome, thy maidens beautiful and fruitful, even as are themselves, the Beloved Maidens, our mothers and thine!"

"Be it well!" said the fathers. "Brothers younger to ye, let us indeed be, and let us, therefore, clasp the warm hands of brothers elder and brothers younger, making the words of the Father of Dawn true, in truth!"

Then the ancient of the People of the Dew replied:

Thus, happily were our fathers joined to the People of the Dew, and the many houses on the hills were now builded together in the plain where first grew the corn plants abundantly; being prepared year after year by the beautiful custom of the ever young maidens, and attended faithfully by the labors of the people and the vigils of their fathers.

When men had almost forgotten the seeking of the Middle, the earth trembled anew, and the shells sounded warning. Murmuring sore when the Twain Beloved came and called them again, yet carrying whatsoever they could with them (more preciously than all things else save their little ones, the seed of corn!), they and the people they had dwelt with journeyed on, seeking safety. For now, their kin were mingled; thus, their children were one people. Wheresoever they rested, they builded them great houses of stone, all together, as may still be seen. And in the plains ever they built them bowers for the watching of the renewal and growth of the seeds of the corn. Therefore, they never hungered whether journeying anon or sitting still.

Now with much of journeying the people came to grow weary with ever seeking for the Middle all together, along a single way, insomuch that increasingly they murmured whenever they were summoned and must needs be leaving their homes and accustomed ranging-places. And so they fell to devising amongst themselves, until at last it seemed good to them to be sending messengers forth in one direction and another, the sooner to feel out the better way, and find signs of the Middle: as, by dividing, a company of hunters the sooner find trace of their quarry.

Now there was a priest of the people named Kâ´wimosa (of the Kâ´kâ master-maker or source), thus named because he it was who was to establish, all unwittingly, the most potent and good sacred dance (myth-drama or Kâ´kâ) as happened after this wise:

He had four sons (some say more) and a daughter. And his eldest son was named K‘yäk´lu, which signifies, it is said, "Whensoever;" for he was wiser of words and the understanding thereof than all others, having listened to the councils of men with all beings, since [399] ever the inner beginning! So, when it was asked who of the precious ones (children of priest-fathers and priest-mothers) should journey northward, seeking to learn the distance thitherward to the great embracing waters, that the Middle might be the better surmised; nor said the Twain aught, as we say naught, to little children weary of a way that must, weary or nay, be accomplished! When this was asked, Kâ´wimosa, the priest, bethought himself of his wise eldest son and said, "Here is he!" Thus K‘yäk´lu was summoned, and made ready with sacrifice presentations from all the priests to all the surpassing-ones for the great journey; and he departed.

Long the people waited. But at last it was said, "Lost is our K‘yäk´lu! For wise of words was he, but not wise of ways!"

And the fathers, mourning, again called a council. Again, when it was inquired, Kâ´wimosa the priest, bethought him, and cried, "Here!" and again were made ready duly and sent forth messengers, this time southward, the next younger brothers of K‘yäk´lu (Ánahohoátchi); for, said the father, they will guide one another if ye send twain. And of these, also, much is told in other talks of our ancient speech; but then, they too, lingered by the way.

Once more a council was called, and again, when it was inquired, Kâ´wimosa cried, "Here!" and this time the youngest son, who was named Síweluhsiwa, because he was a long-haired youth of great beauty; and the daughter, who was named Síwiluhsitsa, because she was a long-tressed maiden of beautiful person; they also were summoned and made ready duly and sent eastward.

Far they journeyed, and as the day quickened they saw before them a distant high mountain.

Thus spake he, for he loved his sister and her beauty. (Nay, but she was soft and beautiful!)

And so, they hastened. When they reached the mountain, Síweluhsiwa built a bower of cedar branches under the shade of a tree. Then he went forth to seek game. When, having captured some, he returned, his sister was sleeping in the bower; so he stepped softly, that he might not disturb her—for he loved his sister, and gently he sat himself down before her and leaned his chin on his hand to watch her. The wind softly blew to and fro, and she slept on; her white cotton mantle and garments were made light for the journey, and thus the wind played with them as it listed over her prostrate form. As the [400] brother gazed at her, he became crazed with love of her, greater than that of a brother's, greater than that of kin men for kin! * * *

Crazed was he, yea, and bideless of act; and the sister, thus awakened, fled from him in loud affright, and then, in shame and hot anger turning, upbraided him fiercely. Wondrous beings were they, more than it is the lot of mere men in these days to be, for they were the children of Kâ´wimosa the priest, and a priestess-mother in the times of creation and newness. And so, like to the surpassing ones, they were ‘hlímnawiho, or changeable-by-will inclined; yea, and all things were k‘yaíyuna or formative, when the world was new! Lo, now! Therefore, as she upbraided him, her eyes grew great and glaring and her face spotted and drawn. And he, as he heard and saw her, grew dazed, and stood senseless before her, his head bowed, his eyes red and swollen, his brow bent and burning.

"Thou shameless of men!" cried the maiden. "Know that thou shalt return to thy people never; nay, nor will I! Lo! I will make by mine the power a deep water dividing this mountain! Alone on one side shalt thou dwell, alone on the other dwell I! I will draw a line, and make a swift water between the day-land and the night-land, between all our people and us!" She stamped with her sandal as she spake, and deep was the mark thereof; for the mountain was hollow and resounding. Then she ran headlong down to the westward end of the mountain and drew her foot along the sands from the south to the northward, and deep was the gully she made. And the brother, seeing her flee, ran after her calling hoarsely. But now, as he neared her, he stopped and stared; and forthwith grew crazed more than ever; but with anguish and fright this time, at her rage and distortion. As she turned again back, he threw his arms aloft, and beat his head and temples and tore away his hair and garments and clutched his eyes and mouth wildly, until great welts and knobs stood out on his head; his eyes puffed and goggled, his lips blubbered and puckered; tears and sweat with wet blood bedrenched his whole person, and he cast himself headlong and rolled in the dust, until coated with the dun earth of that plain. And when he staggered to his feet, the red soil adhered to him as skin cleaves to flesh, and his ugliness hardened.

The maiden stared in wild terror at what she had wrought! And now she, too, was filled with anguish and shrieked aloud, tossing her arms and rushing hither and thither, and so great was her grief and despair that her hair all whitened. Lo! now she lamented plaintively and pitied her brother, for she thought—woman-like!—"But he loved me!" So, she tenderly yearned for him now, and ran toward him. Again he looked at her, for he was crazed, and when he saw her close at hand, so strange looking and ugly, he laughed aloud, and coarsely, but anon stood still, with his hands clasped in front of him and his head bowed before him, dazed! When he laughed, she too laughed; when he was silent and bowed, she cried and besought him. Thus it [401] was with them ever after in those days. They talked loudly to each other; they laughed or they cried. Now they were like silly children, playing on the ground; anon they were wise as the priests and high beings, and harangued as parents to children and leaders to people.

The marks in the mountain and sands sank farther and farther; for much the earth shuddered as was wont in those days. And thus the mountain was sundered in twain and waters welled up in the midway. The furrow in the sands ran deeper and deeper and swifter and swifter with gathering water. Into the nether mountain the pair fled—not apart—but together, distraught. Ceaselessly echoed their gibberish and cries across the wide water and from one mountain side to the other. Thenceforth, together they dwelt in the caves of the place they had chosen, forgetful of the faces of men and recking naught of their own ugly condition!

In time there were born to these twain, twelve children. Nay, neither man-children nor woman-children they! For look now! The first, was a woman in fulness of contour, but a man in stature and brawn. From the mingling of too much seed in one kind, comes the two-fold one kind, ‘hláhmon, being man and woman combined—even as from a kernel of corn with two hearts, ripens an ear that is neither one kind nor the other, but both! Yet not all ill was this first child, because she was born of love—what though crazed!—ere her parents were changed; thus she partook not of their distortions. Not so with her brothers; in semblance of males, yet like boys, the fruit of sex was not in them! For the fruit of mere lust comes to naught, even as corn, self-sown out of season, ripens not. For their parents, being changed to hideousness, abode together witlessly and consorted idly or in passion not quickened of favor to the eye or the heart. And lo! like to their father were his later children, but varied as his moods; for then, as now, what the mother looked most on while withholding them, thus wise were they formed as clay by the thought of the potter; wherefore we cherish our matrons and reveal not to them the evil dramas neither the slaughtered nor hamstrung game lest their children be weakly or go maimed. Thus they were strapping louts, but dun-colored and marked with the welts of their father. Silly were they, yet wise as the gods and high priests; for as simpletons and the crazed speak from the things seen of the instant, uttering belike wise words and prophecy, so spake they, and became the attendants and fosterers, yet the sages and interpreters, of the ancient of dance-dramas or the Kâ´kâ.

Named are they, not with the names of men, but with names of mis-meaning, for there is Pékwina, Priest-speaker of the Sun. Meditative is he, even in the quick of day, after the fashion of his father when shamed, saying little save rarely, and then as irrelevantly as the veriest child or dotard.

[402] Then there is Pí‘hlan Shíwani (Bow Priest-warrior). So cowardly he that he dodges behind ladders, thinking them trees no doubt, and lags after all the others, whenever frightened, even at a fluttering leaf or a crippled spider, and looks in every direction but the straight one, whenever danger threatens!

There is Éshotsi (the Bat) who can see better in the sunlight than any of them, but would maim himself in a shadow, and will avoid a hole in the ground as a woman would a dark place, even were it no bigger than a beetle burrow.

Also there is Muíyapona (Wearer of the Eyelets of Invisibility). He has horns like the catfish, and is knobbed like a bludgeon-squash. But he never by any chance disappears, even when he hides his head behind a ladder rung or turkey quill, yet thinks himself quite out of sight. And he sports with his countenance as though it were as smooth as a damsel's.

There is Pótsoki (the Pouter), who does little but laugh and look bland, for grin he can not; and his younger brother, Ná‘hläshi (Aged Buck), who is the biggest of them all, and what with having grieved and nearly rubbed his eyes out (when his younger brother was captured and carried off by the K‘yámak‘ya-kwe or Snail Kâ´kâ of the South), looks as ancient as a horned toad; yet he is as frisky as a fawn, and giggles like a girl; yea, and bawls as lustily as a small boy playing games.

The next brother, Ítseposa (the Glum or Aggrieved), mourned also for his nearest brother, who was stolen by the Kâ´kâ, too, until his eyes were dry utterly and his chin chapped to protrusion; but nathless he is lively and cheerful and ever as ready indeed as the most complaisant of beings.

K‘yä´lutsi (the Suckling) and Tsa‘hläshi (Old-youth), the youngest, are the most wilfully important of the nine, always advising others and strutting like a young priest in his first dance, or like unto the youthful warrior made too aged-thinking and self-notioned with early honoring.

And while the father stands dazed, with his head bowed and his hands clasped before him or like to broken bows hanging by his sides, these children romp and play (as he and his sister did when turned childish), and verily are like to idiots, or to dotards and crones turned young again, inconstant as laughter, startled to new thought by every flitting thing around them; but, in the presence of the Kâ´kâ of old, they are grave what though so uncouth. And they are the oracles of all olden sayings of deep meanings; wherefore they are called the Kâ´yemashi (Husbandmen of the Kâ´kâ or sacred drama-dance); and they are spoken of, even by the Fathers of the People, as the Á‘hläshi Tséwashi (Sages of the Ancients). And most precious in the sight of the beings and of men are they! But for their birth and the manner thereof, it is said that all had been different; for from it many things [403] came to be as they are, alike for men and gods and even the souls of the dead!

There came a time when the people for whom Síweluhsiwa and Síwiluhsitsa had gone to seek the way, could tarry no longer awaiting them; for, hearing the earth rumble, the Twain Beloved and their Warrior-leaders of the Knife summoned the tribes forth to journey again. Now in these days the people had grown so vast of number that no longer could they journey together; but in great companies they traveled, like herds of bison severed when too numerous for the grass of a single plain. The Bearers of the Ice-wands and the Ancient Brotherhood of the Knife led the clans of the Bear, the Crane, the Grouse and others of the People of Winter (yea and in small part others too), through the northernmost valleys, carrying ever in their midst the precious múetone. The Fathers of the People, Keepers of the seed, and the Ancient Brotherhood of Priests led the clans of the Macaw and other Summer people (and in part others still) through the middle valleys, carrying ever in their midst the precious k‘yáetone. They, being deliberate and wise, sought rather in the pathway between the northward and the southward for the place of the Middle.

The Seed-fathers of the Seed-kin, the Keepers of Fire, and the Ancient Brotherhood of Paíyatuma (Néwe-kwe) led the All-seed clans, the Sun, Badger and other Summer people (not of the Midmost), through the southern valleys, carrying ever in their midst the precious chúetone.

Leading them all, whether through the northern ways, through the middle ways, or through the southern ways, now here, now there, were the Two Beloved ones, and with them their Warriors of the Knife.

Now although those who went by the northern way were called the Bear and Crane father-people, yet with them went some of all the clans, as the Parrot-macaws of the Middle, and the Yellow-corn ones of the Southern people.

And although the People of the Middle way were called the Macaw father-people, yet with them went Bear and Crane people of the north, nevertheless, (a few) and Seed people of the south, also (a few) those of the White Corn.

And although the people of the southern way were called the All-seed father-people, yet with them went a few of both the northern and the middle ways. And this was well! That even though any one of these bands might hap to be divided through wildness of the way or stress of war, they nathless might retain, each of them, the seed of all the kin-lines. Moreover, this of itself speedily came to be, through the mingling of the clans from one to another in the strands of marriage.

And although thus apart the peoples journeyed, descending from the westward the valleys toward north and toward south, like gathering [404] streams from a wide rain-storm, yet also like rain-streams gathering in some great river or lagoon, so they came together and thus abode in seasons of rest. Strong and impetuous, the Bear kindred on the one hand were the first to move and farthest to journey; on the other hand the Seed kindred led the way; whereas, the heart of them all of the Macaw kindred, deliberately (as was their custom) pursued the middle course of the Sun-father.

In such order, then, they came, in time, within sight of the great divided mountain of the Kâ´yemäshi. Seeing smoke and mist rising therefrom, they all, one after another, hastened thither. The Bear peoples were first to approach, and great was their dismay when, on descending into the plain, they beheld a broad river, flowing, not as other waters were wont to flow in that land, from east to west, but straight across their pathway, from toward the south, northward. And lo! on the farther side were the mysterious mountains they sought, but between them rolled swiftly these wide turbid waters, red with the soil of those plains.

Not for long did the impetuous fathers of the Bear and Crane deliberate. Nay! Straightway they strode into the stream and feeling forth with their feet that it e'en might be forded—for so red were its waters that no footing could be seen through them,—they led the way across; yet great was their fearfulness withal; for, full soon, as they watched the water moving under their very eyes, strange chills did pervade them, as though they were themselves changing in being to creatures moving and having being in the waters; even as still may be felt in the giddiness which besets those who, in the midst of troubled or passing waters, gaze long into them. Nathless, they won their way steadfastly to the farther shore. But the poor women who, following closely with the little children on their backs, were more áyaᵘwe (tender, susceptible), became witlessly crazed with these dread fear-feelings of the waters, wherefore, the little ones to whom they clung but the more closely, being k‘yaíyuna and all unripe, were instantly changed by the terror. They turned cold, then colder; they grew scaly, fuller webbed and sharp clawed of hands and feet, longer of tail too, as if for swimming and guidance in unquiet waters. Lo! They felt of a sudden to the mothers that bore them, as the feel of dead things; and, wriggling, scratched their bare shoulders until, shrieking wildly, these mothers let go all hold on them and were even fain to shake them off—fleeing from them in terror. Thus, multitudes of them fell into the swift waters, wailing shrilly and plaintively, as even still it may be said they are heard to cry at night time in those lone waters. For, no sooner did they fall below the surges than they floated and swam away, still crying—changed verily, now, even in bodily form; for, according to [405] their several totems, some became like to the lizard (mík‘yaiya‘hli), chameleon (sémaiyak‘ya), and newt (téwashi); others like to the frog (ták‘aiyuna), toad (ták‘ya), and turtle (étâwa). But their souls (top‘hâ´ina, 'other-being or in-being'), what with the sense of falling, still falling, sank down through the waters, as water itself, being started, sinks down through the sands into the depths below. There, under the lagoon of the hollow mountain where it was erstwhile cleft in twain by the angry maiden-sister Síwiluhsitsa as before told, dwelt, in their seasons, the soul-beings of ancient men of war and violent death. There were the towns for the 'finished' or dead, Hápanawan or the Abode of Ghosts; there also, the great pueblo (city) of the Kâ´kâ, Kâ´‘hluëlawan, the town of many towns wherein stood forever the great assembly house of ghosts, Áhapaáwa Kíwitsinan‘hlana, the kiva which contains the six great chambers in the midst of which sit, at times of gathering in council, the god-priests of all the Kâ´kâ exercising the newly dead in the Kâ´k’okshi or dance of good, and receiving from them the offerings and messages of mortal men to the immortal ones.

Now, when the little ones sank, still sank, seeing naught, the lights of the spirit dancers began to break upon them, and they became, as be the ancients, ‘hlímna, and were numbered with them. And so, being received into the midst of the undying ancients, lo! these little ones thus made the way of dying and the path of the dead; for whither they led, in that olden time, others, fain to seek them (insomuch that they died), followed; and yet others followed these; and so it has continued to be even unto this day.

But the mothers, still crying, knew not this—knew not that their children had returned unharmed into the world whence even themselves had come and whither they too needs now must go, constrained thither by the yearnings of their own hearts in the time of mourning. Loudly, still, they wailed, on the farther shore of the river.

The Seed clans arrived, and strove to cross the waters, but as it had chanced to the others so befel it all dismally with them, until loud became the commotion and multitudes of those behind, nearing—even many of the Midmost clans—turned and fled afar southward along the bank, seeking a better crossing; fled so far that they were lost to sight speedily and strayed never to return!

Nay, they became the fathers and mothers of our Lost Others—lost ever since that time.

Lo! as the people were crying aloud and tossing their hands aloft and the many—so many!—were fleeing away, came the Beloved Twain, and [406] with voices strong-sounding and sure, bade them cease from their clamor and terror, saying—

Thus spake they, and continued speaking; whereupon the people who were yet left, took heart, even the women, and stayed their thoughts, clinging stoutly to their little ones as they fared through the waters, what though the terror and hurt was sore. Thus passed they all safely over, and—even as had been said—as they won their way up from the waters and sat them down to rest on the farther shore below the mountains, lo! the little ones grew warm and right again. But never were the thoughts of womenkind beguiled wholly from that harrowing journey. Wherefore they be timid of deep places, startled (as is the voice of a vessel by any shrillness of sound) and witless-driven by the sight of reptile-creatures. Lo! and so their anxieties are like to press themselves on the unripe and forming children of their bowels. Wherefore, also, we guard their eyes from all weird-seeming things when they be with child.

Now, when the people were rested and the children righted, they arose and journeyed into the plain to the east of the two mountains and the great water between them. Thence they turned them northward to the sunrise slopes of the uppermost of the mountains. There they encamped, mourning for their lost children and awaiting the coming, perchance, of those who had fled away.

Ataht! And all this time K‘yäk´lu, the all-hearing and wise of speech, all alone had been journeying afar in the north land of cold and white desolateness. Lost was he, for lo! all the world he wandered in now was disguised in the snow that lies spread forth there forever. Cold was he—so cold that his face became wan, and white from the frozen mists of his own breathing withal, white as become all creatures who bide there. So cold at night and dreary of heart was he, so lost by day and blinded by light was he, that he wept, continually wept and cried aloud until the tears coursing down his cheeks stained them with falling lines along the wrinkles thereof (as may be seen on his face [407] to this day when in due season he reappears), and he died of heart and thence became transformed (í‘hlimnakna) lastingly as are the gods. Yea, and his lips became splayed with continual calling, and his voice grew shrill and dry-sounding, like to the voices of far-flying water-fowl. As he cried, wandering all blindly hither and thither, these, water-birds, hearing, flocked around him in numbers and curiously peered at him, turning their heads from side to side and ever approaching nearer, all the while calling one to another.

Behold! when he heard them calling, their meanings were plain to him, wise as he was of all speeches! Yet still he lamented aloud, for none told him the way to his country and people.

Now, when the Duck heard his cry, lo! it was so like to her own that she came closer by than any, answering loudly. And when they were thus come near to each other, much related appeared they, strange as that may seem. Forasmuch as he was of all times the listener and speaker, and therein wisest of all men, so was she of all regions the traveler and searcher, knowing all ways, whether above or below the waters, whether in the north, the west, the south, or the east, and therein was the most knowing of all creatures. Thus the wisdom (yúyananak‘ya) of the one comprehended (aíyuhetok‘ya) the knowledge (ánikwanak‘ya) of the other, and K‘yäk´lu in the midst of his lamentations besought counsel and guidance, crying—

"Hold, my child, my father," said the Duck. "Think no longer sad thoughts. Though thou be blind, yet thou hearest all as I see all. Give [408] me, therefore, tinkling shells from thy girdle and place them on my neck and in my beak. Thus may I guide thee with my seeing if so be thou by thy hearing grasp and hold firmly my trail. For look, now! Thy country and the way thither well I know, for I go that way each year leading the wild goose and the crane, who flee thither as winter follows."

And so the K‘yäk´lu placed his talking shells on the neck of the Duck, and in her beak placed the singing shells, which ever in his speakings and listenings K‘yäk´lu had been wont to wear at his girdle; and albeit painfully and lamely, yet he did follow the sound she made with these shells, perching lightly on his searching outstretched hand, and did all too slowly follow her swift flight from place to place wherein she, anon, going forth would await him and urge him, ducking her head that the shells might call loudly, and dipping her beak that they might summon his ears as the hand summons the eyes. By and by they came to the country of thick rains and mists on the borders of the Snow World, and passed from water to water, until at last, lo! wider waters lay in their way. In vain the Duck called and jingled her shells from over the midst of them, K‘yäk´lu could not follow. All maimed was he; nor could he swim or fly as could the Duck.

Now the Rainbow-worm was near, in that land of mists and waters. And when he heard the sacred sounds of the shells he listened. "Ha! these be my grandchildren, and precious be they, for they call one to the other with shells of the great world-encircling waters," said he; and so, with one measure of his length, he placed himself nigh them, saying—

K‘yäk´lu took of his plume-wands the lightest and choicest; and the Duck gave to him her two strong pinion-feathers that he might pendant them therewith, making them far reaching and far-seeing. And the Rainbow arched himself and stooped nigh to them whilst K‘yäk´lu, breathing on the plumes, approached him and fastened them to his heart side. And while with bent head, all white and glistening wet, K‘yäk´lu said the sacred words, not turning to one side nor to the other, behold! the Rainbow shadow gleamed full brightly on his forehead like a little rainbow, (even as the great sky itself gleams little in a tiny dew-drop) and became painted thereon, and í‘hlimna.

[409] "Thanks this day!" said the Rainbow. "Mount, now, on my shoulders, grandson!"

The Rainbow unbent himself lower that K‘yäk´lu might mount; then he arched himself high amidst the clouds, bearing K‘yäk´lu upward as in the breath a mote is borne, and the Duck spread her wings in flight toward the south. Thitherward, like an arrow, the Rainbow-worm straightened himself forward and followed until his face looked into the Lake of the Ancients, the mists whereof were to him breath and substance.

And there in the plain to the north of Kâ´‘hluëlane, K‘yäk´lu descended even ere the sun was fully entered, and while yet it was light, the Rainbow betook himself swiftly back.

But alas! K‘yäk´lu was weary and lame. He could not journey farther, but sat himself down to rest and ponder the way.

Now, as he sat there, all silent, came across the plains the shouts and harangues of the Kâ´yemäshi as they called loudly to one another, telling, like children, of the people who had but then forded the wide river, and passed on to the eastward "with such great ado," said they.

For the children of the Twain knew not yet the people of their parents, nor did their parents tell them aught, save to bid them hide in the mountains; for they willed not that their shame be made known whilst the hearts of their erstwhile people were so sore with anguish.

And as K‘yäk´lu, the wonderful hearer, lifted his head and signed to the Duck, forthwith knowing from the talk of the Kâ´yemäshi who they were and what had chanced to their parents, his own brother and sister, and all the evils that had befallen his people by the sin and change-makings of these two. Lo! the strength of his heart wasted as he bowed him down again in the plain, alone, blinded of sight, wearied and lamed, and now from very sadness blinded even of thought withal, now that he learned of the woes which the two, his own brother and sister, had wrought upon all of the people. The Duck, long waiting, at last shook her shells and called to him. He heard not, or hearing gave no heed, but sat, like one bereft of all thinking, lamenting the deeds of his brother and sister and the woes of his people.

The Duck thereupon fled away toward the mountain whence issued the garrulous talking, and thence beyond, spying water, to the lake in its hollow. There she swam to and fro, this way and that, up and down, loudly quacking and calling. Lo! the lights of the Kíwitsin of the Kâ´kâ began to gleam in the waters, and as she gazed she beheld, rising from them, snout foremost, like one of her own kind, the Sálamopia of the north, whom the gods of the Kâ´kâ, the noble and surpassing [410] Páutiwa and the ancient K‘yáu‘hliwa, had dispatched to bid the Duck dive down and lay before them whatsoever message she might bear. The Duck followed down, down, into the great assembly halls. There she told of the far journeys she had made, of her finding and leading the K‘yäk´lu, and how now K‘yäk´lu sat blind of eyes, maimed and hearing naught of her calling, in the plain beyond the mountains.

"Yea, him know we well!" replied the gods. "Of our sacred breath breathed his father and his mother when days were new and of us shall be numbered they, when time is full. Lo! therefore because changed violently of his grief and sore hardships whilst yet but k‘yaíyuna, he hath become ‘hlímna, and yet unchanging, since finished so; yea, and unceasing, as one of ourselves, thus shall he remain. True also is this, of his brother and sister who dwell with their uncouth offspring in the mountain hard by. Go upward, now, and with thy tinkling shells entice these children to the lake shore. Loudly will they talk of the marvel as in their wilder moments they ever talk of anything new to hap. And they will give no peace to the old ones until these come down also to see thee! Thou wearest the sacred shells and strands of K‘yäk´lu wherewith he was ever wont to count his talks in other days when days were new to men. When these they see, lo! instant grave will become they and listen to thy words, for they will know the things they watched him wear and coveted when they were still little, all in the days that were new to men. Bid them make forthwith of poles and reeds, a litter, and bear it away, the father of them all with his children (nay not the sister-mother, to sore hurt the love of a brother eldest for a sister youngest, wherefore so pitiably he mourneth even now) to where, in the far plain, K‘yäk´lu sits so mourning. Bid them greet him, and bring him hence. They may not enter, but they may point the way and tell him how, fearlessly, to win into our presence, for as one even of ourselves is he become; yea, and they also, save that they stayed themselves for the ages, midway betwixt the living and the dead, by their own rash acts did they stay themselves so, wherefore it is become their office to point the way of the again living to the newly dead, for aye. Tell the grandchild, thy father withal, K‘yäk´lu, to mourn not any longer, neither tarry, but to get him straightway hither, that he may learn from us of his people of the meanings of past times, and of how it shall be in times to come."

Even so did the Duck, as bidden, even so did the Kâ´yemäshi, one and all, as it had been said they would do as the Duck bade them, and [411] ere the morning came, they with a litter went, singing a quaint and pleasant song, adown the northern plain, bearing their litter. And when they found the K‘yäk´lu, lo! he looked upon them in the starlight and wept; but their father, he who had been the glorious Síweluhsiwa, his youngest brother, stood over him and chanted the soothing yet sad dirge-rite, and he, too, wept and bowed his head; but presently he lifted his face and, as a gleeful child, his children joining, cajoled the silent K‘yäk´lu to sit him down in the great soft litter they did bear for him.

Then lifting it on their shoulders, they bore it lightly, singing loudly as they went, to the shores of the deep black lake, where gleamed from the middle the lights of the dead.

Uprose at this point, the Sálamopia Tém‘hlanahna or of all the six regions, led by the leader of them all and taking K‘yäk´lu on their shoulders, they in turn bore him out over the water to the magic ladder of rushes and canes which reared itself high out of the water; and K‘yäk´lu, scattering sacred prayer-meal before him, stepped down the way, slowly, like a blind man, descending a skyhole. No sooner had he taken four steps than the ladder lowered into the deep; and lo! his light was instant darkened.

But when the Sálamopia of the regions entered the central sitting place of the Kâ´kâ with K‘yäk´lu, Shúlawitsi lifted his brand on high and swinging it, lighted the fires anew, so that K‘yäk´lu saw again with fulness of sight and so that they shone on all the gods and soul-beings therein assembled, revealing them. Yea, and through the windows and doorways of all the six chambers encircling, and at each portal, the Sálamopia of the region it pertained and led unto took his station. And Páutiwa, and his warriors the bluehorned Saía‘hliawe, and the tall Sháalako-kwe, yea, and all the god-priests of the regions six, those who are told of without omission in the speech of K‘yäk´lu and in other speeches of our ancient talk, bade K‘yäk´lu welcome, saying, "Comest thou, son?" "Yea," he replied. "Verily then," said Páutiwa—

So said Páutiwa, cloud-sender and sun-priest of souls, and his brothers younger of the regions all, joined in so saying.

Then K‘yäk´lu sat him down and bowed his head, and calling to the Duck, who had guided him, stretched forth his hand and upon it she settled, as upon a wave-crest or a wood bough.

The gods sent forth their runners, the Sálamopia and the timid, fleet-footed Héhea, to summon all beings, and then, gathering themselves in a sacred song-circle, called in from the several chambers dancers in semblance of the Kâ´kokshi, or Dance of Good. And with these came, behold! the little ones who had sunk beneath the waters, well and beautiful and all seeming wonderfully clad in cotton mantles and precious neck jewels. And these played, sad only with the sadness of their mothers, but resting therefrom when in dreams, above, these rested.

And when the dancers paused, the gods turned to K‘yäk´lu and said: "Lo! we begin, given thou be ready."

And K‘yäk´lu said: "It is well; I am ready; yea, even my heart listeneth," and in cadence to their speech following, he moved the Duck with her tinkling, talking shells, as a master of song moves his baton, or a dancer his rattle, and in solemn, ceaseless tone, as in singing yet with speech more steady, the gods, one by one, told to K‘yäk´lu the things each best knew, whereof he so wondrously speaks when come amongst us for the welfare of our little children, bringing them the sacred breath of the Kâ´kâ itself, and to their elders these same speeches of the gods.

When, after long time, they had done, they further charged him with a message of comfort to the mourning mothers, and with commandments and instructions to men and the beings.

Then they brought forth the sacred cigarette, and the master priest-gods smoked in relationship with K‘yäk´lu to all the six regions, and, rising, he was led in turn to the portal of each chamber, first to the northern, then to the western, southern, eastern, upper, and lower, and he placed his fingers on the sill of each, that in aftertimes he should know, though but dim of sight, or in the dark, the places of worship (which men built then but poorly) from others, and in such alone, and to chosen few who hold the rites of the Kâ´kâ, should therein tell and do the customs and words of the gods and tell of other such like precious ancient things.

Then the Sálamopia lifted the ladder and guided upward K‘yäk´lu and the Duck, showing them safely to the shore of the lake. When [413] the old ones (Kâ´yemäshi) heard the shells of the Duck tinkling, forth they came, bringing their litter and singing boisterously, for much they loved K‘yäk´lu as the light of the rising sun fell upon him, as a raven loves bright shells or chips of glistening stone.

And when they had come to the side of K‘yäk´lu, instant they became grave, for he bade them hearken to the words of the gods, and their instructions.

"Ye shall attend me, for know that ye are to be the guardians of the Kâ´kâ and tellers of its meanings, and givers of enjoyment to the children of men, even as ye gave the enjoyment of comfort unto me, when ye sought me in the plain of my sorrows. Ye shall bear me to the people yonder, for I have tidings for them, and instructions the to which ye shall bear witness in aftertimes when I am not by. Ye shall cherish the Kâ´kâ; yea, and all other precious customs, for thereunto as unto life mortal, yet unceasing, became fitted thy father, my brother younger; and thereunto were ye born, ye and thy sister elder, man-woman of the Kâ´kâ, as unto the councils thereof am I become slave yet master. But my sister, thy mother, shall abide by the place she hath made, maintaining it, as woman ever maintaineth the hearth she hath made, all the days of men."

This said K‘yäk´lu as he sat him down on the litter, and obediently the Kâ´yemäshi lifted it upon their shoulders and bore it away, along the trail eastward, down which westward we go after death and fulfilment. And as they journeyed through the plain, calling loudly to one another, the little people of the Marmot villages ran out and stood up, looking at them and calling to one another, which so amused and pleased the Kâ´yemäshi that they became proud of their master and uncle, K‘yäk´lu, and sang all the way thereafter of the audience they had at every prairie-dog village, of Marmot youths and Marmot maidens; and thus they were singing gleefully as they neared the camp of the people, insomuch that none were frightened, but all wondered who were those pleasant, strange people coming, and what one of precious consideration guided of the far-journeying Duck they were bearing aloft on their litter. Thus, ever since, they sing, as they bring in K‘yäk´lu from the western plain, along the river-trail of the dead, and thus happily and expectantly we await their coming, our little ones wonderingly as did the first men of those days.

Speedily the fathers of the people recognized their lost K‘yäk´lu (led and prompted as they were of the Twain), and preciously they housed [414] him, as we preciously and secretly receive with the cigarette of relationship a returning relative, and purify him and ourselves ere he speak, that he may not bring evil or we receive it, perchance, with the breath of his strange words.

Thus the fathers of the people did to K‘yäk´lu and the ancient ones, receiving them into secret council. And as one who returns famished is not given to eat save sparingly at first of the flour of drink (ók‘yäslu), so with this only was K‘yäk´lu regaled; but his bearers were laden speedily with gifts of food and garments which, forsooth, they would not wear save in disorderly ways. Then K‘yäk´lu spake a message of comfort to the mourners, telling them how, below the waters into which their little ones had sunken, they were dwelling in peace amongst the gods, and how all men and mothers would follow them thither in other part in the fulness of each one's time.

And then, holding in his hand the Duck, the guide to his blindness, he spake in measured motion and tone, to the sound of the shells on the neck of the Duck, the words of creation, K‘yäk´lu Mósonan Chïm´mik‘yanak‘ya pénane, and of his wanderings, and the speeches of gods and beings as they had been told him, and the directions of the sacred customs, all did he tell ceaselessly as is still his wont from mid-day to mid-day to each one of the six councils, that no part be forgotten.

Thus did our people first learn of their lost messengers, all save two of them, Ánahoho áchi, and of their lost children in the City of Ghosts; yea, of the spirit beings and man, animal, and of the souls of ancient men dead beforetime; yea, and yet more learned they—that all would gather there even those who had fled away in fear of the waters, in the fulness of time.

And when K‘yäk´lu had done speaking, he and the ancient ones breathed into the nostrils of those who had listened, and into the mouths of four chosen from amongst them (small of stature like as he was) he spat, that their tongues might speak unfailingly the words he had uttered. And these became the K‘yäk´lu Ámosi, whose office we still keep amongst us. Then the ancient ones lifted him upon the litter, and loudly joking about their gifts and bidding men call them ever with the Kâ´kâ that they might receive more háha, they sang of how the young women and maidens would wait for them as for lovers, bringing them the water of guests to drink, and amid laughter they bore K‘yäk´lu back whence they had come, to the mountain and city of the Kâ´kâ (Kâ´‘hluai yálane).

Now, when they had departed, there came from the west, behold! two strangers seeming, guided by the Sálamopia, and all the fleet runners [415] of the Kâ´kâ then first seen of men and feared as by children now, for they were fierce and scourged people from their pathways to make room for those they guided. For know that these were the two brothers Ánahoho who had returned to the desolate cities of their people. Therein had they sought in vain for the living in the blackened houses. They even tore down the chimneys and peered in, seeking for their brother K‘yäk´lu, and when they found him not they smote their faces and held their noses in grief, and all black as were their hands with soot, lo! thus became their faces, flat and masked with the black hand-mark of dismay, and as they held their faces they cried dismally and long.

No sooner did they come into the village of our fathers than they began turning over the things from which the people had fled, and casting them down where the Sálamopia stamped them into the earth or otherwise destroyed them that their likes might go the way of the dead for the dead and the Kâ´kâ. And when the people saw this, they brought forth vessels and baskets and other things without stint, all of which, as though all were chimneys, the Twain Ánahoho took up, and peering into them lifted their faces and cried their dreary mournful cry, casting these things straightway to the ground. Thus to this day they follow their brother, seeking ever, finding never, sending after their brother the souls of men's possessions that all may be well in the after time, in the after time of each age of man.

Long sojourned the people in the town on the sunrise slope of the mountain of Kâ´‘hluëlawan, and what though the earth in time began to groan warningly anew, loath were they to leave the place of the Kâ´kâ and the lake of their dead. But the rumbling grew louder apace, and at last the Twain Beloved called, and bade the people arise, and all together—now that their multitudes were in part diminished—follow them eastward, seeking once more the place of the Middle. Not without murmuring among themselves did the people obey; but after they had fared forward a certain distance they came to a place of fair seeming and great promise, so much so, indeed, that it was said, "Let us tarry in this favored spot, for perchance it may be the place of the Middle."

And so they builded for themselves there greater houses than ever they had builded, and more perfect withal, for they were still great and strong in numbers and wittier than of old, albeit yet unperfected as men; and the place wherein they so builded was Hán‘hlipíŋk‘ya, "The Place of Sacred Stealing," so named in after time for reasons we wot of.

[416] Long did the people abide therein, prosperously; but with waxing ever wiser and stronger their condition changed, so that little suited to it—with their tails and beast clothing—were our wonderful, magical, yet rude, ugly fathers. Being beast-like, they were sore inconvenienced both at home and abroad, in the chase or at war; for now and again they still in their wanderings met older nations of men and man-beings, with whom they needs must strive, so they thought, forsooth, thereby gaining naught save great danger with increase of anger and stubbornness. Thus, not any longer in fear only of the gods and great monsters, but in fear now of the wars they themselves provoked, contending the world with their own kind and with man-beings, changed yet otherwise were they. Of the elders of all their folk-kins the gods therefore called a council.

"Changed, verily and yet more changed shall ye be, oh our children!" cried the Twain gods in such fashion and voice that none failed of heeding in all that great council:

Thereafter more and more goodly of favor became the people, for they dwelt long in Hán‘hlipíŋk‘ya, where, lo! that this might be so, their useless parts had in sacred theft been stolen, as it were, from them, and they gained great strength, and in the fulness thereof they sought more often than ever to war with all strangers (whereby they became still more changed in spirit), the which the Two Beloved watched amain, nor said they aught!

But there came a day when the people grew vain and waxed insolent, saying, "Look now, we are perfect of parts and surely have attained to the Middle place or unto one equal thereunto. Go to, let us build greatly and lay up store, nor wearily wander again even though the earth tremble and the Twain bid us forth. Think ye we shall not be strong and defy even the Fearful?" cried the Men of the Knife, the stout warriors of the Twain. But what of all that? This! Even whilst they were wont to speak in this brave fashion the mountains trembled often, and although afar sounding, much did it abate these boastings!

Well aware of this temper of the people, changed also in spirit became the Twain Beloved. "Verily a time hath come," said they, "and this is the time." Forthwith they called the fathers to council [418] again, as many of them as there were of the Midmost and of all the folk kins, they and the Men of the Knife—brave of mouth yet weak of danger—called they together, and thus spake unto them:

Then the Twain gave directions:

Lo! dwarfed and hideous-disguised were the two gods Áhaiyuta and Mátsailema, erst Uanamachi Píahkoa or the Beloved Twain who Descended—strong now with the full strength of evil; and armed as warriors of old, with long bows and black stone-tipped arrows of cane-wood in quivers of long-tailed skins of catamounts; whizzing slings, and death-singing slung-stones in fiber-pockets; spears with dart dealing fling-slats, and blood-drinking broad-knives of gray stone in fore-pouches of fur-skin; short face-pulping war-clubs stuck aslant in their girdles, and on their backs targets of cotton close plaited with yucca. Yea, and on their trunks, were casings of scorched rawhide, horn-like in hardness, and on their heads wore they helmets of strength like to the thick neck-hide of male elks, whereof they were fashioned.

Lo! and of Chance and Fate were they the Masters of fore-deeming; for they carried the word-painted arrows of destiny (shóliweátsinapa), like the regions of men, four in number. And they carried the shuttle-cocks of divination (hápochiwe), like the regions of men, four in number. And they carried the tubes of hidden things (íyankolotómawe), like the regions of men, four in number. And the revealing-balls thereof, (íyankolote tsemak‘ya móliwe), like the regions of men, four in number. Yea, and they bore with these other things—the feather-bow and plume-arrow of far-finding, tipped with the shell of heart-searching; and the race-sticks of swift journeys and way-winning (mótikwawe) two of them, the right and the left, the pursuer and the pursued of men in contention. All of these things wherewith to divine men's chance, and play games of hazard, wagering the fate of whole nations in mere pastime, had they with them.

Twain Children of terror and magic were they, and when they called with the voice of destruction the smitten warriors of these Twain Children stirred and uprose, breathing battle-cries as echoes answer cries in deep canyons, and swiftly they roused those who still lived, of the deep-slumbering people.

Some, like the drummer and singers, had stiffened been, to stone; nor heard they the shrill death-cries than which in the night time naught is more dread-thrilling. Nay, years come and go, and sitting or lying where stricken the hunter sees them still. But others had endured in flesh, and they were awakened. Then the priests led them back to rebuild their wrecked houses, and the Twain again assembling their warriors, said to them—

Night after night the war-drum sounded, deep in the caves of the valley, and with it the tones of the words—all potent—forbidden and [424] secret which the Twain gods were teaching unto the first Priests of the Bow.

Thus wise were the Priests of the Bow established by teaching of the Twain, whose breaths of destruction each one of them breathed in due part; whom none might gainsay; nay, not even the fathers whose speakers they were, and with whom none might contend; nay, not even sorcerers, whose scourgers they were—nor yet the Fearful!

And so, when on a dark night thereafter the world groaned and the shells sounded warning, all together the Twain and these their new warriors sought the priest-fathers of the people, bidding them take in hand for carrying, their tabernacles of precious possessions. And swiftly and sternly too they wakened all sleepers, old ones and young, and those who obeyed them were gathered in clan-lines and led off to safety, for Áhaiyuta, the elder, and his warriors journeyed before them, and Mátsailema, the younger, and his warriors followed behind—shields of the people, makers and destroyers of pathways! But those who loved sleeping or who murmured like children were left to their evil; they were choked by the black fumes, or buried in the walls of their houses, which fell when presently the earth heaved with dire fumes, fire and thunder. Their bones are still digged by the gopher and marmot.

Thus, from country to country journeyed the people, their fathers the priests and the keepers of the mysteries, with the women and children in their midst, while before them, from valley to valley, the Bow-priests swept danger away.

At last the people neared, in the midst of plains to the eastward, great towns built in the heights (héshotayálawa). But in these times the thoughts of their warriors were always those of the eagle or mountain-lion or other fierce creatures of prey. Of those they met it was "Lo, now! If I can but seize him and utterly overthrow him and eat of his substance, feeding therewith also my kind!" Thus, only, thought they.

Great were the fields and possessions of this people, for they knew how to command and carry the waters, bringing new soil; and this too without hail or rain. So, our ancients, hungry with long wandering for new food, were the more greedy, and gave them battle. Now as these people of the highlands and cliffs were of the elder nations of men and were allied to the Ákâkâ-kwe (the Man-soul Dance-gods) themselves, these our people, ere they had done, were well nigh finished of fighting. For it was here that the K‘yákweina Ók‘yätsiki, or Ancient Woman of the K‘yákweina, who carried her heart in her rattle and was deathless [425] of wounds in the body, led the enemy, crying out shrilly; all of which, yea and more, beyond the words of a sitting, is told in other speeches of our ancient talks, those of the Kâ´kâ. Thus, it fell out ill for the fighting of our impetuous ancients; for, moreover, thunder raged and confused their warriors, rain descended and blinded them, stretching their bow-strings of sinew, and quenching the flight of their arrows as the flight of bees is quenched by the sprinkling-plume of the honey hunter. But the strong ‘Hléetokwe devised bow-strings of yucca, and the Two Little Ones sought counsel of the Sun-father, who revealed the life-secret of the Demoness and the magic power over the under-fires (kóline) of the dwellers in the mountains and cliffs; so that after certain days the enemy in the mountain town were overmastered. And because our people found in that great town some survivors hidden deep in the cellars thereof, and plucked them forth as rats are pulled from a hollow cedar, and found them blackened by the fumes of their own war-magic, yet comely and wiser than the common lot of men withal, they spared them and called them the Kwínikwa-kwe (Black people), and received them into their kin of the Black Corn.

Now for once even the Warriors of the Bow were fully surfeited of fighting, and paused to rest. Thus, warm hands of brothers elder and younger were clasped with the vanquished; and in time (for at first these people were wild of tongue) speech was held with them, whereby our fathers gained much knowledge, even of their own powers and possessions, from these Black people, in like manner as they had gained knowledge from the People of the Dew, whence in like manner also they grew wiser in the ways of living, and loved more to cherish their corn and corn virgins that they might have life and abundance rather than cause death and hunger. Yet were their journeyings not ended. Again, and anon, the shell sounded warning.

When, therefore, the Twain Little Ones, Áhaiyuta and Mátsailema, again bade the people arise to seek the Middle, they divided them into great companies, that they might fare the better (being fewer in numbers together) as well as be the better content with thinking that, thus scattered, they would the sooner find the place they had for so long sought. So, again the Winter people were bidden to go northward, that in their strength they might overcome evils and obstacles and with their bows strung with slackless fiber of the yucca, contend, winning their way with the enemy in cold weather or warm, and in rain and dryness alike. With them, as aforetime, they carried their precious múetone, and with them journeyed Mátsailema and the Warriors of the Knife, they and chosen Priests of the Bow.

Also, to the southward, as before, journeyed the Seed people and the kinties of Corn and others of the Summer people, they and with them [426] the Black people, wise and possessed of the magic of the under-fire, having dealings also with Kâ´kâ-kwe and with the wonderful Chúa-kwe—a people like themselves, of corn, and called therefore People of Corn grains,—they and their Kâ´kâ, the K‘yámak‘ya-kwe, or Snail Beings of the South (those who waged war with men and their Kâ´kâ in after times), for these reasons they, the Summer people, led the people of Corn and Seed and these alien people.

And as before, the people of the Middle—yea, and those of the Seed and Dew who especially cherished the chúetone and the Maidens of Corn—sought the Middle through the midmost way, led of Áhaiyuta, the elder, and his Priests of the Bow.

The People of Winter, those led by the ‘Hléeto-kwe, and Mátsailema, fought their way fiercely into the valley of the Snow-water river (Úk‘yawane—Rio Puerco del Poniente), settling first at the mud-issuing springs of that valley (Hékwainaukwin), where their villages may be seen in mounds to this day, and the marks of the rites of their fathers and of their kin-names on the rocks thereabout.

And they became far wanderers toward the north, building towns wheresoever they paused, some high among the cliffs, others in the plains. And how they reached at last the "Sacred City of the Mists Enfolded" (Shípapulima, at the Hot Springs in Colorado), the Middle of the world of Sacred Brotherhoods (Tík‘yaawa Ítiwana), and were taught of Póshaiyaŋk‘ya ere he descended again; and how they returned also, thus building everywhere they tarried, along the River of Great Water-flowing, (Rio Grande del Norte) even back to the mountains of Zuñiland (Shíwina yálawan) and settled finally at the Place of Planting (Tâ´iya or Las Nutrias)—all this and more is told in the speeches they themselves hold of our ancient discourse.

The people of Corn and the Seeds, guided by the Kwínikwakwe, fared for long peacefully, southward along the valley of the River of Red Flowing Waters, building them towns of beauty and greatness, as may be seen to this day, and the marks of their rites also are on the rocks whithersoever they traveled. Far south they fared until they came to the great valley of Shóhkoniman (home, or place of nativity, of the Flute-canes) beneath the Mountain of Flutes (Shóhko yálana—La Sierra Escudilla), whence they turned them eastward.

How they builded thereafter, wheresoever long they remained, not single towns, but for each sept of their kinties a town by itself, and the names of these clan-towns, and the wars they fought contending with the Kâ´kâ, and how finally they reached the Mountain of Space-speaking Markings (Yála Tétsinapa), then turned them back westward [427] and sat them down at last with other people of the way, in the upper valley of Zuñiland (Shíwina Téu‘hlkwaina), building Héshotatsína (The Town of Speech-markings) and many other towns, all of them round and divided into parts, ere they rejoined the people of the Middle, when that they too had come nigh over the heart of the world—all this and much else is told in the speeches they themselves hold of our ancient discourse.

How the People of the Middle, the Macaw people and their children, journeyed straightway eastward, led by Áhaiyuta and the fathers of all the people, this we tell in the mid-coming speech of our sacred ancient discourse, and in other speeches thereof. How, now, after time, they settled at Kwákina, where the Brotherhood of Fire (Mákekwe) had its place of ancient origin in wondrous wise—told of by themselves—and where originated their great dance drama of the Mountain Sheep, and the power of entrance into fire, and even of contention with sorcery itself.

And at each place in which the people stopped, building greatly, they learned or did some of the things for which those who be custodians of our olden customs amongst the Tík‘yaápapakwe (Sacred Brotherhoods) are still marvelous in their knowledge and practice. But after our father ancients had builded in Kwákina, lo! when the world rumbled and the shells sounded, the noise thereof was not great, and therefore no longer did they arise as a whole people, for seeking yet still the Middle, but always many abode longer, some living through the dangers which followed, and becoming the fathers of "Those who dwell round about the Middle." Still, for long the warnings sounded and the leaders would be summoning the people to seek the "very midmost place wherein the tabernacle of the sacred seed-contents might be placed at rest safely for all time, and where might dwell in peace those who kept it."

It was in this way that first after Kwákina, Háwik’uh was built, and thereafter, round about Zuñi, each (at first lesser because of the people left behind each time) of all the others of the six towns of all the regions the Midmost (Shíwina ‘Hlúella Úlapna).

First, then, Kwákina, then Háwik’uh, K‘yánawe, Hámpasawan, K‘yäkime and Mátsaki. And in what manner the people dwelt in each of these, how they talked and consorted wondrously with beasts and gods alike is told in the télapnawe (tales of the olden time passing) of our ancients, alike in the "lies of the grandfathers" and in the "strands" of their solemn sayings. But always, at each place, were [428] those abiding who believed, despite the warnings, that they had found the Middle, least wise for themselves, contending the which, they continued in the place of their choice, those of the Northern (sept) in the first place, those of the West next, and so, those of the South, East, Upper and Lower regions. Whilst still the main people of the Macaw and the other Middle kinties, sought unweariedly until they thought at last that in Mátsaki they had found indeed the place of the Middle.

Whilst in this persuasion they still tarried there, lo! again, after long wanderings through many valleys, the peoples of Corn and the Seed found them there, through seeing of their smoke, and in the near valley to the eastward found they as well the peoples of the Corn and the Seed, dwelling in their great round towns, the smoke whereof wanderers had also erstwhile been. So they said to them, "Ye are our younger brothers! At Mátsaki, here at the Middle, let us dwell in peace as one people, others of our kinds around about us, yet with us!"

Thereby Mátsaki greatly increased; but the warnings yet still sounded anon and the gods and master-priests of the people could not rest.

Nay, they called a great council of men and the beings, beasts, birds and insects of all kinds ‘hlímna; these were gathered in the council.

After long deliberation it was said:

"Where is K‘yanäs´tïpe, the Water-skate? Lo! legs has he of great extension, six in number. Mayhap he can feel forth with them to the uttermost of all the six regions, thereby pointing out the very Middle." And K‘yanäs´tïpe, being summoned, appeared in semblance, growing greater; for lo! it was the Sun-father himself (K‘yanäs´tïpe through ‘hlímna being). And he answered their questions ere he was bespoken, saying, "Yea, that can I do." And he lifted himself to the zenith, and extended his finger-feet six to all of the six regions, so that they touched to the north, the great waters; and to the west, and the south, and the east, the great waters; and to the northeast, the waters above; and to the southwest, the waters below.

But to the north, his finger-foot grew cold, so he drew it in; and to the west, the waters being nearer, touched his finger-foot thither extended, so he drew that in also. But to the south and east far reached his other finger-feet. Then gradually he settled downward and called out, "Where my heart and navel rest, beneath them mark ye the spot and there build ye a town of the midmost, for there shall be the midmost place of the earth-mother, even the navel; albeit not the center, because of the nearness of cold in the north and the nearness of waters in the west." And when he descended (squatting), his belly [429] rested over the middle of the plain and valley of Zuñi; and when he drew in his finger-legs, lo! there were the trail-roads leading out and in like stays of a spider's net, into and forth from the place he had covered.

Then the fathers of the people built in that spot, and rested thereat their tabernacle of sacred treasures. But K‘yanäs´tïpe had swerved in lowering, and their town was reared a little south of the very midmost place. Nevertheless, no longer in after time sounded the warnings. Hence, because of their great good fortune (hálowilin) in thus finding the stable middle of the world, the priest-fathers of the people called this midmost town the Abiding place of Happy Fortune (Hálonawan).

Yet, because they had erred even so little, and because the first priest of after times did evil, lo! the river to the southward ran full, and breaking from its pathway cut in twain the great town, burying houses and men in the mud of its impetuosity. Whence, those who perished not and those of the flooded towns rounded about fled to the top of the Mountain of Thunder, they with all their Seed people and things, whence the villages they built there were named Tâaiyá‘hltona ‘Hlúelawa, or the "Towns-all-above of-the-seed-all."

But when by the sacrifice of the youth priest and maiden priestess (as told in other speech) the waters had been made to abate and the land became good to walk upon, all the people descended, calling that high mountain place, which ever after hath echoed thunder, Tâaiyálane, or the Mountain of Thunder. When all the towns were rebuilded, then on the northern side of the river they builded anew the Town of the Middle, calling it Hálona Ítiwana (Halona the Midmost); but the desolated part they called Hálonawan, because they had erred there (hálowak‘ya), though even so little.

Now at last never more did the world rumble; yet the fathers of the people questioned in their hearts, fearing further misfortune to their children, if so be they still erred in the resting place of the sacred mysteries whatsoever. So, when the sun had reached the middle between winter and summer, they devised an ordinance and custom whereby this might be tested. They brought out the things of lightning and the [430] earthquake; even the keepers of the great navel-shell were summoned as having canny and magic skill. And as now we do in observing the custom of the Middle-arriving, all the people fasting, all the fires close kept, so then, for ten days they made ready, and on the last night the shell was laid by the sacred fire in Héin Kíwitsina of the North, and watched all the night through, by its keepers and the fathers foremost, and the Priests of the Bow. Meanwhile the incantations of dread meaning, taught of the Twain in Hán‘hlipiŋk‘ya, were chanted, yet the world only rumbled deeply and afar down, but it trembled not, neither did the Seven Fell Ones breathe destruction—only storms. Then, said the fathers, "O, thanks! In peace-expecting mood may we kindle afresh the fires of our hearths for the year that is dawning." And they sent forth new fire to all houses, causing the old to be cast out as is seen and known to us all in the custom of this day of the Middle-arriving!

So, happily abode the people, they and their brothers round about them at the Middle, for surely now the sacred things were resting over the stable middle of the world, and were the foundations of Hálona Ítiwana or the Midmost place of Favor (or fortune).

Now when thus, after long ages of wandering, the tabernacles of the precious seed-things were resting over the Middle at Zuñi (they, the fathers of the people and also the Corn tribes and their other children), then, as in the olden time, men turned their hearts rather to the cherishing of their corn and Corn maidens than to the wasting of lives in war with strange men and the Ákâkâ. Again they loved, cheerfully too, the custom of the beautiful Corn maidens, and this, year after year, they practiced that the seed of seeds might ever be renewed and its abundance be maintained.

And whereas this was well, yet, forsooth! there were not wanting those who grew weary of the custom at last, and said that it was not as in the olden time it had been. Then, said they, the fathers of the people had performed their custom, and the fathers of the people of Dew theirs, the one awaiting the other, as it were, and both joining in the sight of the people all. Others said that the music was not as that of the olden time; that better far was that which of nights they sometimes heard (oftener toward morning) as they wandered up and down the trail by the river; wonderful music this, as of liquid voices in caverns or the echo of women's laughter in water-vases. And this music, they said, was timed with a deep-toned drum, and seemed to come forth from the very bowels of the Mountain of Thunder. Lo! [431] they were awed thereby, and bethought that the music was, mayhap, that of the ghosts of ancient men who had dwelt above in the times of the high waters; but it was far more beautiful, at least, than the music of the ‘Hláhekwe singers when danced the Corn maidens.

Others said yea, and lingering near they had seen, as the daylight increased, white clouds roll upward from the grotto in Thunder mountain like to the mists that leave behind them the dew itself, and as the sun rose, lo! within them even as they faded, the bright garments of the Rainbow-women might sometimes be seen fluttering, and the broidery and paintings of these dancers of the mists were more beautiful than the costumes of even the Maidens of Corn.

Then were the fathers of the People-priests of the House of Houses sore displeased at these murmurings of their children, and bade them to be hushed; yet they pondered, and bethought themselves how to still these foolish children yet more completely, so that the precious Mothers of Corn be not made sad by their plaints.

"What is this ye tell us?" said they. "These things be to the simple as the wind and other movings, speechless; but to us, they be signs, even as erst the warnings of the under-world were signs to our fathers the beloved, and ourselves, that we seek still further the Middle, so are these things signs to us. Stay, therefore, thy feet with patience, while we devise that ye be made content and happy." Then to one another they said, "It may well be Paíyatuma, the liquid voices his flute and the flutes of his players that they tell of. Come now, we will await the time of our custom, and then learn if perchance our hearts guess aright."

Now when the time of ripening corn was near, the fathers ordered preparation for the ‘Hláhekwe, or dance of the Corn maidens.

When the days of preparing had been well nigh numbered, the old ones, even the Kâ´yemäshi themselves who had come with the Kâ´kâ (subject now to the prayerful breaths of the priest-fathers of the people) in the spring and summer times of the Kâ´k’okshi dances, came forth yet again from the west, and with fun and much noise of mouth, made—as for his sister their father had first made—a bower of cedar. But this bower they built, not in the open plain, but in the great court of the town where the dances and customs of the Kâ´kâ were held. For in these days the people and the kinties of Seed no longer came as strangers to the abode of other people, hence builded not their bower in the plain, but in the plaza of their own town. And the Kâ´yemäshi diligently collected cedar-boughs and rafter-poles [432] from the hills beyond the plains. With these, as they had been commanded in olden time by K‘yäk´lu, they builded the great bower. They helped also the chosen men of the Badger and Water kinties to bring the hemlock trees from the southern canyon, and danced, singing gravely for the nonce, as these called forth the growth thereof in sacred smoke of the spaces, and then, as the night fell, laden with offerings from the people, and whitened with the favor of their prayer-meal, they returned whither the Kâ´kâ and the souls of men ever return, westward along the river to the mountains of the Dance of Good and the Waters of the Dead.

Then came the Sun-priest and the Priests of the House of Houses, with the tabernacles of sacred seed-substances, the múetone, the k‘yáetone and the chúetone, and with world-terraced bowls of sacred favor (prayer-meal). These, they bore into the plaza in solemn procession, followed by the matrons of the Seed and Water clans, with the trays of new seed and their offerings of plumed wands to the spaces; and even as today, in every particular, so then the Priest of the Sun and his younger brothers of the House laid out the sacred reclining terrace and roadway of prayer, leading down from it through the middle, and duly placed the sacred things in order upon and before it. As today it is done even in the same order, so then the priests took their places at the rear of the terrace and altar of sacred things, and the matrons theirs by their trays of new seed, those of the Seed kins southwardly to the right, those of the Water kins northwardly to the left beside the reclining terrace and down the sacred roadway guided and placed, each in order, by the chosen leaders of the dance, and watched over by the Priests of the Bow.

Thus, when the singers came and sat them down in the southern side, as today, so then, the father of the people gave the word for beginning, and spake the issuing-forth rites. But then, not as now, there were singers only to the south, yea, and dancers only of them, whence the complainings of the people had been voiced.

As the darkness deepened the master-priest said, "Lo, now! as in the olden time let kindled be a fire, beyond the dancers (ótakwe) in front of the bower. Mayhap by its light yet other singers and dancers will come, as in the olden time came Paíyatuma and his people, for the perfection of the corn. If so be, those who murmur will be content with the completeness of our custom."

Then those whose office it was to keep the shell and fire, generated with their hands the heat thereof, and the youths round about merrily attended them with fuel, and in the brightening light the dance went on.

When the House of the Seven Stars had risen high in the sky, then the fathers summoned before them the two Master-priests of the Bow. [433] "Ye have heard," said they in low-sounding speech, "the complainings of these children and their tales of strange sights and sounds at the grotto under Thunder mountain. Go forth, therefore, and test the truth of all this. If so be ye too hear the music, approach the cavern and send greeting before ye. It were no wonder if ye behold Paíyatuma and his maidens other seven, and his singers and players of flutes. They will deem ye well arrived, and maychance will deign to throw the light of their favor upon us and give us help of their custom, thereby adding to the contentment and welfare of our children among men, and to the completeness of our own observances."

Then with their hands the Fathers of the House extended their breaths, which breathing, the Priests of the Bow went forth, one following the other.

When, up the trail of the river, they had some time passed Mátsaki, they heard the sound of a drum and strains of song now and then echoing down from Thunder mountain. Then they knew that the sounds came from the Cavern of the Rainbow, and so hastened forward; and as they neared the entrance, mists enshrouded them, and they knew now also that verily Paíyatuma was there. Then they called to know if there were gathering within. The singing ceased, and they were bidden to enter and sit. As they did so, Paíyatuma came forward to them and said:

"Ye come well. I have commanded the singers to cease and the players to draw breath from their flutes, that we might hearken to the messages ye bear, since for naught never stranger visits the place of a stranger."

"True," replied the two, "our fathers have sent us to seek and greet ye, it having been declared by our children that thy song-sounds and the customs thereof so far surpass our own, even those of our beloved Maidens, makers of the seed of seeds."

"Ah, well!" replied he, "thus ever is it with men, children, verily! Athirst ever are they for that which is not or which they have not. Yet it is well that ye come, and it shall be as ye wish. Sit ye yet longer, watch and listen."

To the left, grouped around a great world-bowl, clad in broidered cotton vestment, were a splendid band of players, long flutes in their hands and the adornments of god-priests on their faces and persons. In their midst, too, was a drummer and also a bearer of the song-staff; aged, they, and dignified with years.

Paíyatuma scattered a line of pollen on the floor, and folding his arms strode to the rear of the cavern, then turned him about and with straightened mien (tsámo‘hlanishi), advanced again. Following him, lo, and behold! came seven maidens beauteous like to the Maidens of Corn, but taller and fainter of form. Like to them also in costume, yet [434] differing somewhat in the hue of the mantles they wore. And in their hands they carried, not tablets of the sun, moon, and each her star with cross symbol of the Corn priests above them, but, verily, wands of cottonwood from the branchlets and buds of which tiny clouds flowed forth.

"These be the sisters of our Maidens of Corn, of the House of the Stars, seen these too, as they, so these more faintly, as, when above are seen the stars of the House of Seven, others seven are seen below in the waters. Like in form of gesture is their dance custom, but fertile not of the seed, but of the water of life wherewith the seed is quickened," said Paíyatuma.

He lifted his flute, then took his place in the line of the dancers, as the yä´poto does in the line of the Corn dance. The drum sounded until the cavern shook as with thunder. The flutes sang and sighed as the wind in a wooded canyon whilst still the storm is distant. White mists floated up from the wands of the maidens and mingled with the breath of the flutes over the terraced world-bowl, above which sported the butterflies of Summerland, about the dress of the Rainbow in the strange blue light of the night.

Awed and entranced with the beauty of it were the Priests of the Bow, insomuch that when they arose to go they feared to speak their further message. But Paíyatuma, smiling, gave them his breath with his hands and said, "Go ye the way before, telling the fathers of our custom, and straightway we will follow."

Then silently the Priests of the Bow returned as they had come, and entering the dance-court and bower, bowed low and breathed over the hands of the fathers and by them being breathed and smoked in turn, told of what they had seen and listened to in the Cave of the Rainbow. But the watchers had grown weary, and only the fathers heard and understood. While the people nodded their heads all drowsily, some sleeping, the leaders arose as their father ancients had arisen on that night of the birth of Corn in the olden time, and carried the sacred gourds aside and placed them around a great world-bowl wherein was water, and over them in secret (as in the olden time those fathers-ancients had done with the prayer-wands and grass seeds, so now) they performed rites, and said mystic prayer-words. And in the bowl they put dew of honey and sacred honey-dust of corn-pollen, and the ancient stones—ancient of water whence water increases. Then, to the left and northward side they placed the bowl and with it a great drum jar, and spread blankets as for singers other than those already sitting on the southern side.

After that they sat them down again, and then the Priests of the Bow signed their guardian younger brothers to bestir the people assembled [435] that they might sit the more seemly for the coming, mayhap, of precious strangers.

Ere long, the sound of music was heard, coming from up the river, and soon came Paíyatuma followed by his Flute people and singers and maidens of the Flute dance. Uprose the fathers and all the watching people, greeting the God of Dawn with outstretched hands and offerings of prayer-meal, and words of thanks and welcome. Then the singers took their places and sounded their drum, flutes, and song of clear waters, while the Maidens of the Dew danced their custom of the Flute dance. Greatly marveled the people when from the wands they bore forth came white clouds, and fine cool mists descended.

Now when the dance was ended and the Dew maidens, with Paíyatuma, had retired within the bower, forth came the beautiful and ever young Mothers of Corn. And when the players of the flutes saw them, they were enamored of their beauty, and gazed upon them so intently that fain were the maidens to let fall their hair and cast down their eyes. Yet the youths grew not less bold of eye. Then, yea and with jealousy now, bolder grew the youths mortal, who led the dance and attended the dancers, and lo! as the morning neared and the dancers of the flute came forth again, these, impassioned and in rivalry, sought all too freely the presence of the Mother-maidens, no longer holding them so precious as in olden time, but e'en plucking at their white garments.

Meanwhile the people, eagerly watching the new dance, gave little heed to aught else. For behold! the waters rose in the terraced bowl and flowed out toward the dancers, yea, and the mists increased greatly, shrouding the watchers and the dancers alike, until within them the Maidens of Corn, all white their garments, became invisible! Then sadly and noiselessly they stole in amongst the people and laid their corn-wands down amongst the trays, and passing the seed-corn over their persons, placed it back in the trays, and laid their white broidered garments thereupon as mothers lay soft kilting over their babes. Behold! having thus by their wonderful knowledge now placed within the corn the substance of their flesh, then even as the mists became they, and with the mists drifting, fled away, verily, to the far south Summerland!

As the day dawned the dancers of the flutes completed their custom, the players, waving their flutes over the people assembled, followed Paíyatuma as he strode, wordless, forth from the midst of the people.

The call was voiced, and the song of the Maidens of Corn sounded as when the others had retired before; the drum was beaten and the rattles [436] were shaken—but all in vain. No maidens came forth from the bower. Then eagerly the leaders sought all through the bower. Naught found they save the precious wands and the garments all softly laid thereupon, of their beloved Maidens of the Seed. Deep was their grief and all silent were the people. Then spake the fathers: "Look ye now; ye have watched ill, ye matrons and elders, and therein grievously have ye sinned, wherefore lost be our beloved maidens, mothers of the Seed of Seed, for some amongst our children have dared to hold them less than precious, and look upon them as upon maidens of the people they look! Wherefore arise, and brush away from thy persons and spit forth from thy mouths the evil of this night, that the day find ye not shame-darkened, and further ill befall ye not than the grievous loss of our beautiful maidens; for the rash forwardness of our youths, and the negligence ye have proven guilty of in failing to watch all things well are sore, and are punished full meetly as was warned us aforetime by this our grievous loss!"

Then said they to one another, "We must seek (but how?) the maidens; and we must summon them forth from their hiding with solemn promise, if only that we may look upon them once more and see that they go forth at least content with those who have not wrought this evil, and content with us, not wroth; and that they be not thus wroth or sad hearted, and therefore withhold not from us their sacred breaths of blessing, lacking which the corn seed, life of flesh, can not flourish. But who shall seek them for us? They left no trail behind and far must have instant journeyed, being now of other-being—as may be seen by their cast-off garments, left here with us. O, woe! woe the day when we heeded not well their preciousness! If woe to us, woe indeed to our murmuring children who know not what they want, and lightly consider too many of the things they have, therein lightly holding them!"

Again, therefore, called they forth the two master-priests, and said: "Who, now, think ye, should journey to seek our precious maidens? Bethink ye, strong of will, who amongst the beings is even as ye are, strong of will and good of eyes?

"There is our great elder brother and father, the Eagle, he of the side floating down (sulahaiyan látane) and the terraced tail-fan (áwi‘hluiyan k‘yátine); surely he is enduring of will and surpassing of sight."

"Yea, most surely," said the fathers. "Go ye forth and beseech him."

Then northward fared the twain swiftly to Twin mountain, where dwelt with his mate and his young, in a grotto high up among the crags, the Eagle of the White Bonnet.

And when they climbed the mountain and spake in at the entrance of the grotto, behold! only the eaglets were there, who, frightened, [437] screamed lustily, striving to hide themselves in the dark recesses to the rearward, "O, pull not our feathers, ye of hurtful touch, but wait, when we are older we will drop them e'en from the clouds for you!"

"Hush!" said the warriors, "wait ye in peace, for we seek not ye but thy father!"

But from afar came at once, a frown on his brow, the old Eagle. "Why disturb ye my pin-featherlings?" cried he.

"Behold, father and elder brother, we come seeking only the light of thy favor. Listen!"

Then they told him of the lost Corn maidens, and prayed him to seek them, that messages of conciliation might be sent them or given.

"Being so, be it well with thy wishes. Go ye before contentedly," answered the Eagle, smoothing his feathers.

Forthwith the warriors returned to the council of the fathers, relating how that their message had been well received, and the eagle leapt forth and winged his way high into the sky—high, high, until he circled among the clouds, small seeming and swift, as seed-down in a whirlwind. And all through the heights he circled and sailed, to the north, the west, the south and the east. Yet nowhere saw he trace of the Maidens. Then he flew lower, returning, and the people heard the roar of his wings almost ere the warriors were rested, and arose eagerly to receive his tidings. As he alighted, the fathers said, "Enter thou and sit, oh brother, and say to us what thou hast to say;" and they offered him the cigarette of the space-relations.

When they had puffed to the regions and purified his breath with smoke, and blown smoke over the sacred things, then the Eagle spake: "Far have I journeyed, scanning all the regions. Neither blue bird nor wood-rat can hide from my seeing," said he, snapping his beak and looking aslant. "Neither of them, unless they hide under bushes; yet have I failed to see aught of the maidens ye seek for. Send you, therefore, for my younger brother the Falcon; strong of flight is he, yet not so potently strong as I, and nearer the ground he takes his way ere sunrise."

Then the Eagle, scarce awaiting the thanks of the fathers, spread his wings and flew away to Twin mountain, and the Warrior Priests of the Bow, sought again fleetly over the plain to the westward for his younger brother, the Falcon.

They found him sitting on an ant hill; nor would he have paused but for their cries of peaceful import, for, said he, as they approached him, "If ye have snare-strings I will be off like the flight of an arrow well plumed of our feathers!"

"Nay, now!" said the twain. "Thy elder brother hath bidden us seek thee." Thereupon they told him what had passed, and how that the Eagle had failed to find their maidens so white and beautiful.

[438] "Failed, say ye? Of course he failed! For he clambers aloft to the clouds and thinks, forsooth, that he can see under every bush and into every shadow, as sees the Sun-father who sees not with eyes! Go ye before," said the Falcon; and ere they had turned toward the town, he had spread his sharp wings and was skimming off over the tops of the trees and bushes as though verily seeking for field mice or birds' nests. And the warriors returned to tell the fathers and await his coming; but after he had sought far over the world to the north and the west, the east and the south, he too returned and was received as had been the Eagle; but when he had settled on the edge of a tray, before the altar, as on the ant hills he settles today, and had smoked and been smoked as had been the Eagle, he told the sorrowing fathers and mothers that he had looked behind every copse and cliff-shadow, but of the maidens had found no trace. "They are hidden more closely than ever sparrow hid," said he, gripping the cover of the tray on which he perched as though it were real feathers and blood, and ruffling his crest. Then he, too, flew away to his hills in the west.

"Alas! alas! our beautiful maiden mothers!" cried the matrons. "Lost, lost as the dead are they!" "Yea," said others, "where, how indeed, shall we seek them now? For the far-seeing Eagle and the close-searching Falcon alike have failed to find them."

"Stay your feet with patience," said the fathers. For some amongst them heard a Raven who was wandering about the edge of the town at break of day seeking food in the dirt and refuse, and they bethought themselves. "Look, now! There is Heavy-nose, whose beak never fails to find the substance of seed itself, however so little or well hidden it be. Surely he well must know then, of the maiden-mothers thereof. Let us call him." So they bade the warrior-priests go forth once more. Forth to the river side went the priests. "We carry no pricking quills," said they, raising their hands all weaponless, "and, O, Black-banded father, we seek your aid; for look now, the mother-maidens of seed whose substance is the food alike of thy people and our people, have fled away whither neither our grandfather the Eagle, nor yet his younger brother the Falcon, can trace them; and we pray thee to aid us or give us counsel of guidance."

"Ka! ka!" cried the Raven. "Nay, now; much too hungry am I to go abroad fasting on business for ye and thy kind. Ye are stingy! Here have I been since ever perching time, striving to win a throatful, but ye pick thy bones and lick thy bowls too clean for the like of that, be sure!"

"But come in then, thou poor grandfather. Surely we will give thee food to eat; yea, and a cigarette to smoke with all due observance!"

"Say ye so?" said the Raven, ruffling his collar and opening his mouth so wide with a lusty kwa-la-ka, that well he might have swallowed his [439] own head. "Go ye before, then," said he, and he followed them closely into the court of dancers.

Not ill to look upon was he, for upon his shoulders were bands of cotton, white, and his back was blue and gleaming as the tresses of a maiden dancer in sunlight. When the warriors had spoken to the fathers, the master priest of them, rising, came forward and greeted the Raven, bidding him sit and smoke.

"Ha! there is corn in this, else why the stalk thereof?" said the Raven as, taking the cane cigarette of the far-spaces, he noticed the joint thereof. Therefore, forthwith, as he had seen the master do, so did he, only more greedily. He sucked in such a throatful of the smoke, fire and all, that it well nigh strangled him, and he coughed and grew giddy and sick to such a pass that the smoke, all hot and stinging, went through every part of him, and filled all his feathers, making even his brown eyes bluer and blacker in rings! It is not to be wondered at, this blueness of flesh, blackness of dress and tearfulness, yea and skinniness, of eye which we see in his kindred today. Nay, nor is it matter of wonder, either, that for all that, they are as greedy of corn-food as ever, for look now—no sooner had the old Raven recovered than he espied one of the ears of corn half hidden under the mantle-covers of the trays. He leapt from his sitting place laughing (as they always do when they find anything, these ravens), then catching up the ear of corn, he made off with it over the heads of the people and the tops of the houses, saying, "Ha! ha! in this wise and in no other meseems will ye find thy Seed maidens!"

Nevertheless, after some absence, he came back, saying, "A sharp eye have I for the flesh of the maidens, but of their breathing-beings, who might see them, ye dolts, save by help of the Father of Dawn Mist himself, whose breath makes others of breath seen as itself;" whereupon he flew away again kawkling.

"Truly now, truly," said the elders to one another; "but how shall we find, and how prevail on our father Paíyatuma to aid us, when so grievous is ours the fault? Which same, moreover, he warned us of in the old time."

Of a sudden, for the sun was rising, they heard Paíyatuma in his daylight mood and ‘hlímnan. Thoughtless and loud, uncouth of mouth, was he, as he took his way along the outskirts of the village. Joking was he, as today joke fearlessly of the fearful, his children the Néwe-kwe, for all his words and deeds were reversals (íyatï‘hlna pénawe) of themselves and of his sacred being. Thus, when quickly the warrior priests were sped to meet him, and had given to him their greetings and messages, he sat him down on a heap of vile refuse, saying that he was about to make festival thereof, and could in no wise be [440] disturbed. "Why come ye not?" said he, "cowards and followers of the people?"

"Nay, but we are Priests of the Bow, the twain who lead them, father, and we do come."

"Nay, but ye do not come!"

"Yea, verily we do come, and to seek thy favor, asking that ye accompany us to the council of the elders," said the two priests.

"Still I say ye nay, and that ye are children, all; and that if ye did come, ye could not summon me, and that if ye did summon me, go would I not, forsooth, to a council of little children; nay, not I!" said he, rising and preparing forthwith to follow them, as it were, but immediately taking the lead, and striding rudely into the presence of the fathers whom he greeted noisily and with laughter like one distraught, and without dignity or shame.

"My poor little children," said he to the aged priests and the white haired matrons, "good the night to ye all" (albeit in full dawning); "ye fare happily, I see, which perplexes me with sorrow."

"Comest thou, father?" said the chief priest; "pity thou our shame and sorrow."

"Father yourself; nay, not I!"

"Father," said the chief priest once more, "verily we are guilty, but lo! yet the more sad from much seeking in vain for our maidens the mothers of seed; and we have summoned thee to beseech the light of thy wisdom and favor, earnestly, O, father, notwithstanding our fault which thou thyself warned us in olden time to beware, yet do we beseech thee!"

"Ha! how good that I find ye so happy, guileless, arrogant and so little needing of my counsel and helping."

"But we beseech the light of thy favor, O, father, and aid in the finding of our beautiful maidens."

"Oh that is all, is it? But why find that which is not lost, or summon those who will not come? Even if they were lost and would come, look now! I would not go to seek them. And if I went to seek them I could not find them, and if I found them and called them they would not hearken and follow, and even if they would I should bid them bide in Summerland if they were there, and tell them ye cared naught for their presence, having too preciously cherished them."

"Lo, now!" said he, looking down and at the fathers; "I see that thine old ones, those whom ye follow, are all wise, while ye have been foolish and negligent, not preparing sacredly the plumes of the spaces, nor setting them in order before the uplifted terrace, nor yet here behind the winding lines of the seed trays and the walkers by them," said he as he stooped to pluck up the very plumes he had said were not there and withal in front of the reclining terrace and the straight rows of patient sitters. One—the yellow, that of the north—he took, and breathed thereon. "Evil, all evil and ill made," quoth he, shaking his [441] head over its sacred completeness and beauty. Then he took up another, that of the west, then the red of the south and the white of the east. And gathering them in his arms he said, turning to go, "Now verily we approach."

As he thus turned to go, Pékwina the master, Speaker of the Sun, who, all wise, well knew the meaning of these lying speeches, arose, and taking two plumes, the banded wing-tip feathers of the turkey, the right and the left, shifted them as he advanced toward Paíyatuma, taking the left one in his right hand and the right one in his left hand. And nearing Paíyatuma he stroked him with the tips of the feathers, upward, breathing from them each time. Four times he stroked him, and then laid the feathers on his lips. And Paíyatuma spat upon them and breathed upon them, and all the people spat by his sign of command, uprising. Then the master-priest took the right feather in his right hand and the left feather in his left, and casting abroad the lying spittle, himself spat lightly and blew upon the feathers, and with them stroked the lips, then the person, of Paíyatuma, this time downward, breathing upon them. And this he did four times, and the face of Paíyatuma grew grave, and he lifted himself upward; and when he had so uplifted himself, lo! he was aged and grand and straight, as is a tall tree shorn by lightnings. Then placing the plume wands in the hands of the father, he took the banded plumes from him and breathed in from them, and out on the hands of the father, and folding his arms held upright in each hand the feather pertaining thereto. Then he spake:

"Thanks this day, thou father of the people. Thou art wise of thought and good of heart, divining that my evil of speech and act were but the assumption of the evils in thy children who, had they not turned false to good and fickle of their duties commanded, had else been followers of thee as are the fawns unerringly followers of the deer in the mountains and plains; and whose falsity, therefore lyingly, as it were, I did take unto myself and spit forth that they might be turned unto thee yet again and set straight in the paths of right commandment. From out of me, haply, thou hast now withdrawn the breath of reversal, and from out of me the speech of lying, even as thy children have spat forth, by my will and example, their wronging of commandments.

"Thanks this day; and therefore, in that ye, O, ye fathers, have kept thine hearts steadfastly right and straight of inclination, therefore will we show unto ye the light of our favor.

"Verily I will summon from Summerland, for there methinks they bide, once more the beautiful maidens, that ye look once more upon them and make offering in plumes of sacrifice meet for them, and that they consummate the seedfulness of the seed of seeds, presenting them all perfected, to ye; for lost are they as dwellers amongst ye, even as I warned ye aforetime they would be, if not held precious of person.

"Disperse, therefore, from this thy custom when ye shall have completed as is due and meet the song-lines and sacred speeches, and the [442] making ready thereby of the offerings of sacred plume-wands (télikinawe) and sacred water (k‘yáline). Choose then, four youths, so young that they have neither known nor sinned aught of the flesh, and being of the Seed and Water kinties are meet to bear to the Shrine of the Middle, called Hépatinane, these offerings of good meaning and influence to the Earth-mother, the Maidens of Corn, and the Beloved of the Ancient Spaces. Them four ye shall accompany, ye fathers of the people, they in thy midst, bearing the things precious, the elder Master-priest of the Bow leading, and the other following, the elder before, the younger behind. Ye shall walk about the shrine four times, once for each region and the breath and season thereof, and set within the shrine and round about it with perfect speech and in order, as ye would regulate the plantings of grains, these signs of thine hearts and of the custom ye cherish. Rest ye contentedly thereafter until, with the final moon's full growing, ye await our return-coming. Ye and the others, fathers of this custom of the seed, shall then await us as for far-coming runners bearing messages of import, wait ye thus in the sacred gathering place of the north, which is the first, and which ye call Héin Kíwitsinan. There shall ye bide our coming in good and perfect council, that ye receive perfectly the perfected seed of seeds."

Again the father bent low, and Paíyatuma breathed upon him, and saying "Thus much it is finished ere I depart," turned him about and sped away so fleetly that none saw him when they went forth to see.

Beyond the first valley of the high plain to the southward, he set the four plume-wands in this wise: First, the yellow, he planted upright, and over it leaned, looking at it intently. And when it had ceased to flutter, lo! the eagle down on it leaned northward, but moved not. Then he thus set the blue wand and watched it, and the white wand; but the eagle down on them leaned to right and left and still northward, yet moved not thereafter.

Then farther on he planted the red wand, and breathing not, long watched it closely, bending low. Soon the soft down-plumes began to wave as though blown by the breath of some small creature; backward and forward, northward and southward they swayed, as if in time to the breath of one resting.

"Ha! 'tis the breath of my maidens in Summerland!" quoth Paíyatuma, "for the plume of the southland sways, soft though, to their gentle breathing. Lo! thus it is and thus shall it ever be when I set the down of my mists on the plains, and scatter my bright beads in the northland; summer shall go thither from afar, borne on the breaths of the Seed maidens, and where they breathe, warmth, health, showers and fertility shall follow with the birds of Summerland and the butterflies, northward over the world." This he said as he uprose and sped, by the magic of his knowledge how, all swiftly, far southward [443] into the countries of Summerland; yea, swiftly and all silently as the soft breath he sought for, bearing his painted flute before him. And when he paused as though to rest, he played on his painted flute, and quickly butterflies and birds sought the dew of his breathings therefrom.

Them he sent forth to seek the Maidens, following swiftly, and long ere he found them he greeted them, with the music of his song-sound, as the People of Seed now greet them in the song of their dances.

And when the Maidens heard his music and saw his tall form advancing through their great fields of ready quickened corn, they plucked ears thereof, each of her kind, and with them filled their colored trays and over all spread broidered mantles—broidered in all bright colors and with the creature-signs of Summerland. From eldest to youngest they sallied forth to meet and to welcome him, still in their great fields of corn! Then he greeted them, each with the touch of his hands and the breath of his flute, and bade them prepare to follow him erewhile to the northland home of their deserted children.

Lo! when the time had come, by the magic of their knowledge how, they lightened themselves of all weariableness or lingerfulness, and in their foster-father's lead, his swift lead, sped back as the stars speed over the world at night time toward the home of our ancients. Yet at night and dawn only journeyed they, as the dead do and the stars also. Thus journeying and resting by the way, that the appointed days might be numbered, they came at evening in the full of the last moon to the place of the Middle, bearing as at first their trays of seed, each her own kind.

No longer a clown speaking and doing reversals of meanings—as do his children (followers) the Néwekwe, today,—was Paíyatuma, as he walked into the court of the dancers ere the dusk of the evening, and stood with folded arms at the foot of the bow-fringed ladder of priestly council, he and his attendant follower (ánsetone) Shútsuk‘ya, brother of Kwélele! Nay, he was tall and beautiful, and banded with his own mists, and as wings carried upright in his hands, under his folded arms, banded also, the wing-plumes right and left, of the turkey, wherewithal he had winged his way from afar leading the Maidens and followed as by his own shadow, by the black being of corn-soot, who cries with the voice of the frost-wind when the corn has grown aged and the harvest is taken away—Shútsuk‘ya.

And again, surpassingly beautiful were the Maidens clothed in the white cotton and broidered garments of Summerland, even as far [444] walkers have said are appareled our lost others! And each in her place stood the Maidens.

Shrill now whistled Shútsuk‘ya, so that all the people around, onlooking, started and shuddered. Then upward from the place of gathering came the chief priest, bearing a vessel of sacred meal—for below were gathered within, waiting (all the night and day) the fathers of the people and those of the Seed and Water and the keepers of the sacred things, praying and chanting—and when he saw Paíyatuma, him he welcomed, scattering the sacred meal which contains the substance of the life not of daylight, down the ladder-rungs, and thence leading from the sky-hole along the four sides of the roof terrace of the Kíwitsinan leftwardly, and then rightwardly into the entrance place of the descending ladder where stood high its bow-fringed standards. And as the priest retired down the descending ladder, Paíyatuma stepped easily forward and up the sanctified road-way on the ascending ladder (thus, of sacred substance made for him), followed by Shútsuk‘ya, him only. Then walking to the line-mark of each region, prayed he, standing straight, consecrating it; and when each consecration was uttered, Shútsuk‘ya touched him with his wands and shrilly whistled once.

Then when the words were all said, Shútsuk‘ya shrilly whistled again, four times, each time touching Paíyatuma with the wands four times as he turned him about, and then signed him to come forward to the outer ascending ladder below the which waited the Maidens watching.

Then Paíyatuma reached down, and the Maiden-mother of the North, who was first, advanced to the foot of the ladder and lifted from off her head the beautiful tray of yellow corn, and this, Paíyatuma taking, presented to the regions, each in succession, praying the while, at the mark of each on the sacred line, and being signaled unto, each time, by the four-times repeated whistle of Shútsuk‘ya. Thus, the Priest of the North, made aware when the number of presentations was fully accomplished, came upward and received from the hands of Paíyatuma the tray of most sacred seed and breathed deeply therefrom, saying thanks and bearing it below.

Now was the Maiden of the North, by retiring to the end of the line of her sisters, to the south stationed; and the Maiden of the West was thus become first, and she advanced as her elder sister had, when Paíyatuma turned forward, and gave up her tray of the blue corn which thus also as before, when the presentations were fully accomplished, the Master-priest of the West received, and breathed from deeply and for it said thanks, and bore it below; and so, each in turn, the Maidens gave up their trays of precious seed; the Maiden of the South, the red, which the Master-priest of the South received; the Maiden of the East, the white, which the Master-priest of the East received; and so, the tray many-colored and the tray black, and last, yet first at last, the tray [445] of all-color seed, which the Priestess of Seed and All, herself received. And now, behold! the Maidens stood as before, she of the North at the northern end, but with her face southward far looking, she of the West next, and lo! the seventh, last, southward, and standing thus, the darkness of the night fell around them; and as shadows in deep night, so these Maidens of the Seed of Corn, the beloved and beautiful, were seen no more of men.

And Paíyatuma stood alone, at last, for Shútsuk‘ya walked now behind the Maidens, whistling shrilly (as the frost-wind whistles when the corn is gathered away) among the lone canes and dry leaves of a gleaned field. And Paíyatuma descended the ladder, and stood in the fire-light with folded arms, in the midst of the fathers. And he spake unto them:

"Behold! with my lost Maidens, mothers to ye, I have returned; and finding ye gathered in good and perfect council according to my commandments and the approval of thy wisdom, I have restored unto ye with mine own hands, that which they else could not have given ye, the flesh of each made perfect in generative seed. This ye shall cherish, apart in kind, for all time, as the seed of all thy seed, and in so far as ye cherish it, verily it shall be multiplied!

"As ye have done in the days now measured, so also ye shall do in the days to come; ye shall keep the beautiful custom of the Mother-maidens of Corn, all in due season, preparing therefor strenuously. Dance in it, shall thy maidens, chosen of the Seed kinties; thus, as it were, ye shall again see the beautiful Mothers of Seed and as it were also, they shall renew the seed of each season, and therein shall ye gain in them again the preciousness of the Mother-maidens, yet lose them even thus gained, each year; choosing, therefore, each season newly, the Maidens of the Seed, that these who be lost as maidens be replaced as maidens in the replacing of the Mother-maidens.

"And ye shall keep, after each custom of the Corn Maidens, the flute custom of the Water Maidens, and after, in due season, the custom of this day also, the which I have shown unto ye. Having danced first with thy maidens of the Seed kin for the ripening of the corn, ye shall next dance with thy maidens and youth of the Water kin for the fertilizing of the seed, and after, in the full of the last moon thy Maidens of Corn shall bring the seed unto ye of the house, as ye have seen, that it be perfected; and they shall lead others maidens of other kins—not seven, but many times seven in number—who shall bring seed and the food thereof (for multiplied many times seven shall be the seed!) unto ye and thy younger brothers, that the seed be finished as the substance of flesh. Amongst my followers, also, some shall represent me and my attendant Shútsuk‘ya ‘hlímna of us; and they shall choose [446] maidens of the Water kin ‘hlímna of the Flute maidens for the flute custom, and after, shall lead Maidens of the Seed ‘hlímna of the Mother-maidens, as we have this day led the Mother-maidens themselves unto thy presence; and as I have this day elevated, offered to the spaces and given ye from them, the seed, each kind, so shall they, in after time, give ye the seed, that ye sanctify it, ye and the good Kâ´kâ, for the people and the plantings of the spring time to come.

"For look ye, and hearken! Ye loved the custom of the Maidens, whence verily ye had life; yet amongst ye some held not preciously their persons, hence them ye shall see no more save in the persons of thine own maidens ‘hlímna of them, or in dreams or visions like thereto. For, lo! they have departed, since the children of men would seek to change the sustaining blessedness of their flesh into suffering humanity which sustains not but is sustained, and they would perish—even as the maidenhood of thy daughters must perish—and in the loving of men and the cherishing of men's children, lo! they, even they, would forget the cherishing of their beautiful seed-growing!

"Lo! as a mother of her own being and blood gives life and sustenance to her offspring, so have these given unto ye—for ye are their children—the means of life and sustenance. The Mother-maidens are gone, but lo! the seed of each is with ye! From the beginning of the newly come sun each year, ye shall treasure their gifts throughout the Moon Nameless, the Moon of the Sacred Fire and the Earth-whitening, the Moon of the Snow-broken Boughs, the Moon of the Snowless Pathways, the Moon of the Greater Sand-driving Storms, and the Moon of the Lesser Sand-driving Storms, shall ye treasure these gifts, with them, making perfect, by means of sacred observances of thy rites and the rites of the Kâ´kâ, the Seed of Seeds. Then in the new soil which the winter winds, hail, snow and water have brought unto ye the possessors of the múetone, ye shall bury in perfect order as I instruct ye, these gifts, their flesh, as ye bury the flesh of the dead. And as the flesh of the finished dead decays, so shall this flesh decay; but as from the flesh of the finished dead, the other-being (soul) in the night light of the Kâ´kâ springs forth, so from this flesh shall spring forth in the day light of the Sun-father, new being, like to the first, yet in sevenfold amplitude.

"Of this food shall ye ever eat and be bereft of hunger. Behold! beautiful and perfect were the Maidens, and as this their flesh, derived from them in beauty and by beautiful custom is perfect and beautiful, so shall it confer on those nourished of it, perfection of person, and beauty, like to that of those from whom it was derived, so long as like them their customs are those of Maidens."

"And now will I teach ye the customs and song of the planting," said Paíyatuma; and then first he sat him down and smoked the cigarette [447] of relationship with the fathers of the Seed and Water kinties, and all night long until the dawn the songs sounded and the sacred instructions of the seed (tâ´a téusu haítosh nawe) sounded.

And in the gray mists of the morning Paíyatuma was hidden—and is seen no more of men.

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