“What!” said a Bureau chief who, because he signed a great many letters daily without reading them, believed himself intelligent. “You recommended dynamiting the First Mesa—the destruction of that oasis of beauty, and peace, and—and—”
“And trachoma, and tuberculosis, and child prostitution,” I finished for him, as he gasped and his words failed, as I knew they would. Words always fail a Bureau chief. Like the long-range gun of the Germans, he is accustomed to firing things across the continent, secure in that the other fellow cannot immediately crash his words back into his teeth.
I had not recommended that. I had simply advocated the destruction of the road leading to Walpi, since the Government and its Bureau Chief would not advance sufficient moneys to make the road safe for travel.
That is the viewpoint of tourist and bureaucrat,—the artist has one of pure sentimentality,—of all those who have viewed the Hopi, who have been charmed by the color of his life, but who have been utterly blind to his miseries, and who have contributed nothing to his well-being.
No one has a keener appreciation than I of the artistic value of the Hopi pueblos—those old streets of worn rock where the bearded Spanish walked; the curious archways and the irregular little balconies from which children peer over at one; the thought of phantom Mission bells from the peach orchards. But I was not stupid enough to overlook that these same streets contained offal, that the houses were not ventilated, and that there were various [[205]]unseemly stenches in the air. A tourist must leave his olfactory organs at home. And I knew, being in charge, that all the labor of industrious and conscientious field-matrons was not enough to keep those quaint streets and courtyards clean.
I remember another visitor at another Snake Dance, a man sitting on the parapet of a Hopi kiva, looking down through the ladder entrance. I saw that a number of dancers were below there, preparing costumes. They had an array of skins and masks and feathers, with many cans of bright paints.
“I suppose you know a good bit about that too?” I asked.
“Well, I recognize some of the signs, common to Indian people.”
“Shall we go down? You can give them a hand,” I suggested.