Part 13 (2/2)

Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial dances. ”If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat.” ”When you go to the hunt, travel with a light blanket.” We talk of getting back to Mother Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a dance.

Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the Vandals of Europe--Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard to say; for the white man began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What does the Indian know of ”prior rights” in filing for water? Have not these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-canons of the Gila and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.

They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the overflow of the torrential rains--that only brings the alkali wash to the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally protected as they crossed the continent to California.

What are the American people going to do about it? Nothing, of course.

When the wrong has been done and the tribe reduced to extermination by inches of starvation, some muckraker will rise and write an article about it, or some ethnologist a brochure about an exterminated people.

Meantime, the children of the Pimas and Papagoes have not enough to eat owing to the white man taking all their water. They are the people of ”the Golden Age,” ”the Morning Glow.”

We drove back from Casa Grande by starlight over the antelope plains. I looked back to the crumbling ruins of the Great House, and its five compounds, where the men and women and children of the Morning Glow came to dance and wors.h.i.+p according to all the light they had. Its falling walls and dim traditions and fading outlines seemed typical of the pa.s.sing of the race. Why does one people pa.s.s and another come?

Christians say that those who fear not G.o.d, shall pa.s.s away from the memory of men, forever.

Evolutionists say that those who are not fit, shall not survive.

The Spaniard of the Southwest shrugs his gay shoulders under a tilted sombrero hat, and says _Quien sabe?_ ”Who knows?”

CHAPTER XV

SAN XAVIER DEL BAC MISSION, TUCSON, ARIZONA

It is the Desert. Incense and frankincense, fragrance of roses and resin of pines, cedar smells smoking in the sunlight, scent the air. Sunrise comes over the mountain rim in shafts of a chariot wheel; and the mountains, engirting the Desert round and round, are themselves veiled in a mist, intangible and s.h.i.+mmering as dreams--a mist shot with the gold of sunlight; and the air is champagne, ozone, nectar. Except in the dead heat of midsummer, snow s.h.i.+nes opal from the mountain peaks; and in the outline of yon Tucson Range, the figure of a giant can be seen lying p.r.o.ne, face to sunlight, face to stars, face to the dews of heaven, as the faces of G.o.d-like races ever are.

You wind round a juniper grove--”cedars of Lebanon,” the Old Testament would call it. There is the silver tinkle of a bell; and the flocks come down to the watering pools, flocks led by maidens, as in the days of Rachael and Jacob; and the shepherds--only they call them ”herders,”

fight for first place round the water pool, as they did in the days of Rachael and Jacob. Then, you come to a walled spring where date palms shade the ground. And the maidens are there, ”drawing water from the well,” carrying water in ollas on their heads, bronzed statues of perfect poise and perfect grace, daughters of the Desert, hard lovers, hard haters, veiled as all mysteries are veiled.

You turn but a spur in the mountains: you dip into a valley smoking with the dews of the morning; or come up a mesa,--and a winged horseman spurs past, hair tied back by red scarf, pantaloons of white linen, sash of rainbow colors; and you are amid the dwellings of men. Strings of red chile like garlands of huge red corals hang against the sun-baked brick or clay. Curs come out and bark at the heels of your horse--that is why the Oriental always called an enemy ”a dog.” Pottery makers look up from their kiln fires of sheep manure, at you, the remote pa.s.serby. The basket workers weave and weave like the Three Fates of Life. One old woman is so aged and wizened and infirm that she must sit inside her basket to carry out the pattern of what life is to her; and the sunlight strikes back from the heat-baked walls in a glare that stabs the eye; and you hear the tinkle of the bells from the watering pools.

Then, suddenly, for the first time, you see It.

You have turned a spur of the Mountains, dipped into a valley, come up on the Mesa into the sunlight, and there It is--the eternal mountains with their eternal lavender veil round the valley like the tiered seats of a coliseum, the mist like a theater drop curtain where you may paint your own pictures of fancy, and in the midst of the great amphitheater rises an island rock; and on the island rock is a grotto; and in the grotto is the figure of the Mother of Christ--in purplish blue, of course, as betokens eternal purity--and below the island of rock in the midst of the amphitheater something swims into your ken that is neither of Heaven nor earth. White, glaringly white as the very spotlessness of Heaven, twin-towered as befitting the dual nature of man, flesh and spirit; pointed in its towers and minarets and belfries, betokening the reaching of the spirit of Man up to G.o.d; lions between the arches of the roofed piazzas, as betokening the lion-hearted spirit of Man fighting his enemies of Flesh and Spirit up to G.o.d!

Palms before arched white walls shut out the world--Peace and Seclusion and Purity!

You dip into a valley, the scent of the cedars in your nostrils and lungs, the peace of G.o.d in your heart. Then you come up to a high mesa and you see the vision of the white symbol swimming between earth and sky but always pointing skyward.

Where are you, anyway: in Persia amid floating palaces, on the Nile, approaching the palaces of Allahabad in India, or coming up to Moorish minarets and twin towns of the Alhambra in Spain?

Believe me, you are in neither Europe, Asia, nor Africa. You are in a much despised land called ”America,” whence wealth and culture run off to Europe, Asia and Africa, to find what they call ”art” and ”antiquity.”

It is October 3rd in Tucson, Arizona; not far from the borders of Old Mexico as the rest of the world reckon distance. The rain has been falling in torrents. Rain is not supposed to fall in the Desert, but it has been coming down in slant torrents and the sky is reflected everywhere in the roadside pools. The air is soft as rose petals, for the alt.i.tude is only 2,000 feet; too high to be languid, too low for the sting of autumn frosts.

We motor, first, through the old Spanish town--relics of a grandeur that America does not know to-day, a grandeur more of spirit than display.

The old Spanish grandee never counted his dollars, nor measured up the value of a meal to a guest. But he counted honor dear as the Virgin Mary, and made a gamble of life, and hated tensely as he loved. The old mansion houses are fallen in disrepute, to-day. They are given over, for the most part to Chinese and j.a.panese merchants; but through the open windows you can still see plazas and patios of inner courtyards, where oleanders are in perpetual bloom and roses climb the trellis work, and the parrot calls out ”swear words” of Spanish pirate and highwayman. St.

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