Peggy laughed and threw back her head so that her dark eyes, clear and frank as a sweet boy’s, rested on the summit of the old cliffs above them.
“Oh, I don’t believe the Indian is as bad as he is painted,” she said jokingly. “Really, there are ideas and symbols in their religion which seem to me very beautiful when one understands them. And Tewa is a very fine fellow, I think, regardless of his nationality. But come on, let’s go back, dear. How cool the nights do grow out here, even after the hot August days. Don’t those gray Indian houses, with the ladders leading to their second floors, look like ruins of romantic old stone battlements?”
CHAPTER XVIII
The Indian Village
Not only was the Sunrise Camp Fire guardian a little relieved by the companionship of Ralph Marshall and Terry Benton and their western friend, Howard Brent, the next day, but the girls as well.
The climb up a precipice of four hundred or more feet to reach the village of Oraibi required a good deal of effort, but, fortunately, the camping party had grown accustomed to climbing in the past two months. But once there, for the difference in appearance between Oraibi and a white man’s city, one might have made a journey to the moon.
The houses were gray, like the native stone, and built on terraces with outside ladders ascending to their second floors. They were made of slabs of stone set in mud, and had many tiny windows.
Today the narrow streets were thronging with Indian men and women dressed in extraordinary festal clothes.
The Camp Fire party had arisen at daylight and yet they had missed the singing and the race from the plain below in the early morning performance of the great Snake Ceremony. At present, young men and old kept appearing out of kivas, which are the underground chambers where the Indian secret religious ceremonies are performed. And their faces were so strangely painted, their heads decorated with such brightly colored feathers, and their bodies so strung with beads, gay blankets and strips of long fur, that they might have come from some region far deeper under the ground.
The group of Camp Fire girls remained as close together as possible.
For, beside the Indians, there were many tourists in the streets—Mexican cowboys, western ranchmen, travelers from the East and visiting Indians from other tribes.