In these ceremonies, three weeks went by, with every day an ague. At the end of that time, the patient said that he was “looking down the descending ladder.”
His friends then cinched him upon a saddle, and brought him here, muffled in a blanket, just like a bag of bones. We had him dumped in the wool room. This was four days ago. We had no calomel, so we gave him a generous dose of blue mass, about thirty grains. On the following morning we administered a liberal draught of castor oil, and then we gave him about thirty grains of quinine, in four doses, daily. Two days ago his ague left him. This morning he and his friends left for home. Just as he was leaving, John the Jeweler told me he was feeling so well, he thought that by to-morrow night he could resume the performance of his marital duties.
A. M. Stephen
Waiyautitsa of Zuñi, New Mexico
“Isn’t it hard to believe that life should be so intricate and complex among those meek, adobe houses on that low hill?”
We were on the last mile or so of the forty-mile drive through the red sandstone above and below, and the green cedar and spruce and sagebrush from Gallup to Zuñi; behind us to the southeast was the great mesa to which three centuries ago the people had escaped for a while from Spanish arrogance, the mesa where one day we were to seek for the shrines of the War Leaders and the Song Youth and the Earth Woman as we ostensibly hunted rabbits; and before us, barely in sight, so quietly does an Indian pueblo fit into the landscape, were the rectangular blocks of the many-storied Zuñi houses whose flat roofs make broken lines, mesa-like, against the sky. At the highest point, a three-storied house, the town crier was probably at that very moment calling out to the townspeople the orders of the governor and council for the following day; but we were still too far away to hear, quiet as was the air, and our unarrested eyes turned westward to the flaming spectacle of a sunset the like of which is not to be seen outside the sweeping valley plain of Zuñi.
Now and again, as you walk between those “meek, adobe houses,” dodging a snouting pig, or assuming indifference to the dogs that dash out from every corner to snarl or yelp; now and again as you see the villagers going about their daily affairs, men driving in from the fields, or taking the horses in or out of the corrals, women fetching water from the well or bound on a visit to a neighbor, little boys chasing one another and babies playing about in the dirt, now and again that first impression of material simplicity returns and with it the feeling that the round of life must be simple, too. But the feeling never lasts long, never holds its own with the crowding impressions of ceremonial rain dance or pilgrimage or domiciliary visitation, of baffling sacerdotal organization and still more baffling sacerdotal feuds, of elaborate pantheon, of innumerable myths and tales, of associations in story or cult with every hill and rock and spring, of kinship ramifications and matrimonial histories, of irksome relationships with Mexicans and “Americans,” and of village gossip which is made up so comprehensively of the secular and the sacred as to pass far beyond the range of even a New England church social.
It is not surprising that accounts of Zuñi are often bewildering. In our own complex culture biography may be a clarifying form of description. Might it not avail at Zuñi? I venture this biography of Waiyautitsa.[6]