The Snake Dance ends very close to sunset. The [[283]]crowds leave the mesa-top, down the trails afoot or mule-back, down the rocky roads in rough wagons, a scrambling multitude. The sun is gilding the western walls of First Mesa, throwing the east-side roads and trails in shadow, and above, the ruined crest of the headland loom black in a gorgeous halo. The farther eastern valley is bathed in a strange lemon light. The far-away northern capes gleam luminously in scarlet and gold, and then suddenly are gone. Huh-kwat-we, the Terrace of the Winds, pales in lavender and grayish green. Twilight, with its mysterious desert hush, steals over Hopi-land. Something has been fulfilled in accordance with an ancient prophecy. The desert gods have been appeased.
Soon it is dark, and stars appear as vesper candles. And then, all about the foot of the great fortress-like mesa, lighting the sand dunes, gleaming warmly through the peach trees, grow camp-fires. Where is usually a heavy silence at evening, broken only by sheep bells, now one hears laughter, many voices, the sound of the chef at work; and the smell of cooking rises. Coffee and bacon, desert fare, spread their aroma, and a ravenous hunger comes to one. Here is a tiny group about a tented auto, there amid horses and harness and camp dunnage are thirty around one board. “Come and get it!”
I recall incidents of my introduction to these scenes. Armijo, the trader’s relative, had brought his treasured violin. I heard its tones from the trail, and when I came to Hubbell’s camp, there a group of them, musicians of the posts, were making ready to match their skill against the melody that tourists bring. Supper put away, the concert began.
“How do you like this?” asked the master of the bow, and as he swept the strings, that saddest of memory songs [[284]]cried poignantly, a song fit for a desert night and a desert camp: La Golondrina! Such harmonies of double-stopping I had seldom heard. It seemed to me—or was it desert magic?—that Kreisler could do no more. Silence. And then applause from fifty camps.
And Ed’s guitar. Soon the lilting airs of old fandangos would sing through the stunted trees, and one could imagine that the long-dead children of the padres made fiesta.
“Now, Doctor,” said someone.
“What do you play, Doctor?” I asked.
“I play the banjo,” he replied—I thought with a shade of mockery in his voice. Now I had just heard the Spaniard’s violin sob a song that had swept a nation, and Ed’s lightsome Mexican airs were no mean music for a summer camp. Night, under the old trees and in the shadow of the mesa of the gods, brings the romance of serenades, especially soothing after a long, tiresome day.
But—a banjo! That thumpety, plankety, plunkety thing! I was sorry I had spoken. He would oblige with something to fit clogs and the levee, and the whole atmosphere of that evening would vanish, never to return! The doctor opened a case.
“What would you like to hear?”