THE HOPI Country is in Arizona, next the Navaho country, and some seventy miles north of the Santa Fé Railroad. The Hopis are Pueblo Indians, village Indians, so their reservation is not large. It consists of a square tract of grayish, unappetizing desert, out of which rise three tall arid mesas, broken off in ragged pallid rock. On the top of the mesas perch the ragged broken grayish pueblos, identical with the mesas on which they stand.

The nearest village, Walpi, stands in half-ruin high, high on a narrow rocktop where no leaf of life ever was tender. It is all gray, utterly dry, utterly pallid, stone and dust, and very narrow. Below it all the stark light of the dry Arizona sun. Walpi is called the 'first mesa.' And it is at the far edge of Walpi you see the withered beaks and claws and bones of sacrificed eagles, in a rock-cleft under the sky. They sacrifice an eagle each year, on the brink, by rolling him out and crushing him so as to shed no blood. Then they drop his remains down the dry cleft in the promontory's farthest gray tip.

The trail winds on, utterly bumpy and horrible, for thirty miles, past the second mesa, where Chimopova is, on to the third mesa. And on the Sunday afternoon of August 17 black automobile after automobile lurched and crawled across the gray desert, where low gray sage-scrub was coming to pallid yellow. Black hood followed crawling after black hood, like a funeral cortège. The motor-cars, with all the

1 From the Adelphi (London literary monthly), January and February

tourists, wending their way to the third and farthest mesa, thirty miles across this dismal desert where an odd water-windmill spun, and odd patches of corn blew in the strong desert wind, like dark-green women with fringed shawls blowing and fluttering, not far from the foot of the gray up-piled mesa.

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The snake-dance, I am told, is held once a year, on each of the three mesas in succession. This year of grace 1924 it was to be held in Hotevilla, the last village on the farthest western tip of the third mesa. On and on bumped the cars. The lonely second mesa lay in the distance. On and on, to the ragged ghost of the third mesa.

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

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

Hotevilla is a tiny little village of gray little houses, raggedly built with undressed stone and mud around a

little oblong plaza, and partly in ruins. One of the chief two-story houses on the small square is a ruin, with big square window-holes. It is a parched gray country of snakes and eagles, pitched up against the sky. And a few dark-faced, short, thickly built Indians have their few peach trees among the sand, their beans and squashes on the naked sand under the sky, their springs of brackish water.

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

What had they come for? Mostly to see men hold live rattlesnakes in their mouths. 'I never did see a rattlesnake, and I'm crazy to see one!' cried a girl with bobbed hair. There you have it. People trail hundreds of miles, avidly, to see this circus-performance of men handling live rattlesnakes that may bite them any minute even do bite them. Some show, that!

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

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

plied rebuke in good faith, and looks round with a grin at the 'church.' But it is a good-humored, very decent crowd, ready to respect any sort of feelings. And the Indian with his 'religion' is a sort of public pet.

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

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

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

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

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

The animistic religion, as we call it, is not the religion of the Spirit. A religion of spirits, yes. But not of Spirit. There is no One Spirit. There is no One God. There is no Creator. There is strictly no God at all, because all is alive. In our conception of religion

there exists God and His Creation: two things. We are creatures of God; therefore we pray to God as the Father, the Saviour, the Maker.

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

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

They say that the twelve officiating men of the Snake clan of the tribe have for nine days been hunting snakes in the rocks. They have been performing the mysteries for nine days in the kiva, and for two days they have fasted completely. All these days they have tended the snakes, washed them with repeated lustrations, soothed them, and exchanged spirits with them. The spirit of man soothing and seeking and making interchange with the spirits of the snakes. For the snakes are more rudimentary, nearer to the great convulsive powers. Nearer to the nameless Sun, more knowing in the slanting tracks of the rain, the patter

ing of the invisible feet of the rainmonster from the sky. The snakes are man's next emissaries to the rain-gods. The snakes lie nearer to the source of potency, the dark, lurking, intense sun at the centre of the earth. For to the cultured animist—and the Pueblo Indian is such the earth's dark centre holds its dark sun, our source of isolated being, round which our world coils its folds like a great snake. The snake is nearer the dark sun.

They say people say-that rattlesnakes are no travelers. They haunt the same spots on earth, and die there. It is said also that the snake-priestsso-called-of the Hopi probably capture the same snakes year after year.

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

The first is a heavy old man with heavy, long, wild gray hair and heavy fringe. He plods intensely forward, in the silence, followed in a sort of circle by the other gray-smeared, long-haired, naked, concentrated men. The oldest men are first; the last is a shorthaired boy of fourteen or fifteen. There are only eight men- the so-called ante

lope-priests. They pace round in a circle, rudely, absorbedly, till the first heavy intense old man, with his massive gray hair flowing, comes to the lid. on the ground, near the tuft of kivaboughs. He rapidly shakes from the hollow of his right hand a little white meal on the lid, stamps heavily, with naked right foot, on the meal, so the wood resounds, and paces heavily forward. Each man, to the boy, shakes meal, stamps, paces absorbedly on in the circle, comes to the lid again, shakes meal, stamps, paces absorbedly on, comes a third time to the lid, or trapdoor, and this time spits on the lid, stamps, and goes on. And this time the eight men file away behind the lid, between it and the tuft of green boughs. And there they stand in a line, their backs to the kiva-tuft of green; silent, absorbed, bowing a little to the ground.

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

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

They pace rapidly round, with that heavy wild silence of concentration characteristic of them, and cast meal and stamp upon the lid, cast meal and stamp in the second round, come round and spit and stamp in the third. For

to the savage, the animist, to spit may be a kind of blessing, a communion, a sort of embrace.

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

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

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

This lasts a minute or two. Then the antelope-priests stand bowed and still,

and the snake-priests take up the swaying and the deep chant, which sometimes is so low it is like a mutter underground, inaudible. The rhythm is crude, the swaying unison is all uneven. Culturally there is nothing. If it were not for that mystic, dark-sacred concentration.

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

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

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

VOL. 325-NO. 4213

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

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

Suddenly, with abrupt silence, in paced the snake-priests, headed by the same heavy man with solid gray hair