When dreams come true

by Ritter Brown

"Is there nothing between the picture your people present and the world we know?"

"Nothing! What else could there be? After the final appraisement of things has been taken and they have been weighed in the balance and adjudged, this is the condition that must confront mankind, for no other condition offers man such unlimited scope for the development of his higher nature. What you see is the true picture of the delivered man. The Golden Age, or the Garden of Eden is no myth. Men once were free and remained so until they gave way to desire and established for themselves a world of delusion in which there is no permanency either of thought or possession. The traditions of all nations and all peoples, from time immemorial, tell of this state when men were free. They also predict the destruction of present-day society. The Utopias and Golden Ages depicted by poets and dreamers, though beautiful to dwell upon in fancy, are of the tissue of dreams. They will not bear analysis. They are merely other names for different forms of bondage; the same old romantic fallacies which we are forever meeting in works of fiction."

"And how long shall the world we know continue until the new dispensation comes to pass?"

"Until men overcome the fear of death! Then shall they be born anew and come into their rightful heritage. Then shall they grasp the spiritual significance of the Golden Age as voiced by the Prophet: When first the foundations of the Earth were laid; when the morning stars sang together and all the Sons of God shouted for joy, for we are they!"

XLI

On either side of the village, forming a vast semicircle, stood innumerable lodges and hogans, temporary structures erected by the inhabitants of the other villages, who had come to show homage to the Princess and the White Chief, as the Captain was called.

While gazing in the direction of the village which was too far distant for them to distinguish more than an indistinct outline of objects, they beheld two dark columns of horsemen issue forth from the center of the great semicircle of lodges and move slowly in their direction. Chiquita guessed their meaning. As a child she had witnessed the ceremony when her father, the Whirlwind, was proclaimed Chief of the nation.

Without pausing, they came trailing across the valley in two separate columns, thousands of horsemen and women, the men on the right hand, the women on the left; all riding bareback with simple riatas twisted around the horse's lower jaw. Save for their sandals and the skins of the panther and ocelot and jaguar, the Mexican leopard, which they wore clasped at the left shoulder by a golden, jeweled clasp, and which fell diagonally down across the body to the right knee, leaving the arms and shoulders and the greater part of the body bare and the left leg exposed to the hip, the women were as naked as the men who wore sandals and loin-skins only. Heavy clasps and bracelets and girdles of gold and silver, set with pearls and opals, and turquoise and topaz, and emeralds and sapphires, adorned their arms and waists.

Among the Tewana there was no distinction in authority between man and woman. Like the Amazons of old, the women carried long steel-tipped lances and shields and bows and quivers of arrows slung across their backs as did the men. The head of each Cacique or Chieftain of a hundred warriors or Amazons was adorned with a circlet of gold with a clasp of precious stones on the left side of the head holding a single eagle's feather that slanted downward across the left shoulder.

On they came, the half-wild horses prancing and plunging and snorting and neighing, their manes and the long black hair and braids of the men and women flying in the breeze; the lance tips and jewels and their naked, bronze bodies flashing and glistening in the sun; a wonderful, wild, picturesque, barbaric pageant, a voice from the past; magnificent specimens of manhood and womanhood; free men, exemplifying the fullness of life—the life that is worth living. The jewels and precious metals which they wore represented incredible wealth, but were regarded by them as objects of beauty only, for these were the Tewana, the people, who for the sake of freedom, had trampled material wealth under foot; had held Montezuma in check and resisted the encroachments of the Spaniard ever since the days of Cortez, knowing themselves to be a superior people and of more ancient origin.