Hundreds of men and women watched from the house tops of the pueblo. Over a hundred horsemen, with gay kerchiefs about their brows, stood on the further side of the river with the Shalecos, and five or six cars with American sightseers were drawn up also. The mighty mountains, the Butte and the Twin Butte, immemorially sacred, looked down at the scene across the snows. Then the Longhorns returned from smiting the village and danced again with the great strange Shaleco birds. The hundred horsemen suddenly galloped away toward the mountains, and Shalecos and Longhorns began to move rapidly away from the pueblo. And I stood with Wilfrid Ewart in the snow and shine of that fair afternoon and watched them fade from our eyes.
"Shaleco has gone away to the mountains. Shaleco not come again for another year," said I softly, echoing the Indian.
"By Jove!" cried Wilfrid, as if waking from a reverie. "That was fine. This has been the best of it all—"
And then Wilfrid had to go. For he was one in a crowd in a car. And I was left behind when almost every one else had gone.
And at night I saw the Mudheads dance again, this time without their masks, and showing their true features. Two old men stood, one each side of the sacred shrine, and balanced eagle feathers while they danced, now and then dipping the feathers in the sacred meal. The drum men beat the drums and hallooed, and the brown men danced and perspired. The Shalecos, alas, were gone. The Mudheads had become ourselves, now repentant and prayerful and asking blessings from the Bird.
CHAPTER XX DESCENT INTO THE GRAND CAÑON
1
Its discovery was part of the fruitless quest of El Dorado by Coronado—the greatest hole in the world and nothing in it. He had hoped to find another Mexico in the North and despoil it of its jewels. Like the Vandal he was, he plunged into the American Sahara to loot another Rome. Cibola and Quivira were his glittering dreams. He rode in all two thousand miles, cactus and alkali-whitened plains all the way. He fought not men but deserts; instead of storied Cibola he found the mud huts of the Zunyi Indians, rich only in their personal adornments of turquoise and silver; and instead of fantastic Quivira with princes in golden armor, he found near the great bend of the Arkansas River, the tent dwellers of what is now Wichita. The mirage of El Dorado appeared constantly before him and his followers. His horsemen wandered in many directions seeking tidings of gold or of kingdoms to conquer. And one of them came, as was inevitable, to the great gap in the earth hundreds of miles long, leagues across, leagues as it seemed downward, the Cañon del Grande, and the descent of it was as a descent to the hidden heart of the world. It added one more fantastic page to the story of the King of Spain's new lands wherein "of antres vast and deserts idle" much was spoken.