Few plays are staged more effectively than these performances. The adobe walls of the houses furnish a perfect background. The court seems entirely inclosed and the processions of dancers enter and return by passageways set at right angles on either side. In the centre of the plaza was a long, white, wooden box painted in colors with cloud-terrace and rain symbols which the musicians used as a resonator for their notched-stick rattles. While we talked, the agent pointed out familiar faces like Niña, the pretty granddaughter of old Nayuchi the war chief, and Lusalu, the fat governor. The small children played on the edges of the crowd and mud-bedaubed clowns lolled around the painted box. Two old men dressed in gala attire, with white smocks and gay bandas and sashes, took up the notched instruments and began scraping them in a rhythmic motion with plectra made of sheep bone. There are few more mysterious and disturbing sounds than this same scraping. The time is perfect, the rhythm inexorable. Something was about to happen.
Two long processions advanced slowly into the plaza. In single file, keeping perfect time, their turtle-shell, leg rattles in absolute unison, dressed all alike in kilts and armlets, with faces and bodies painted white, the dancers approached each other from opposite sides, and wonderful to behold, each dancer with head thrown back supported a tall spruce tree erect in his mouth. Below were the bodies of the white-painted figures, robust and vigorous, and above a moving forest. The processions continued to advance, and curved round the plaza until they displayed their entire length, halted with a loud fanfare of gourd rattles,—and then became still and silent. There were women among them—and one wearing a white, cylinder-shaped mask. Some children, neophytes, followed, and on one side a tiny boy with a miniature spruce brought up the rear. The dancers rested, withdrew the trees from their mouths and held them, butts upward with the top boughs resting on the ground. Then it was that the full significance of the performance was revealed. The butts, rudely chopped to a tapering point eight or more inches in length, had been entirely swallowed.
Again the strident notes of the rattles sounded. The dancers took up their trees, elevated and adjusted them in their mouths and danced as before. There was the same volume of coördinated sounds, of gourd rattles, of resonant shells and the swish, swish of the garments. Again the white mask danced on.... It grew dark and I left the plaza, in a daze. What did it all mean—the painted box, the swallowed trees, the white mask?
Stewart Culin
Havasupai Days
I
Lanso is a hedonist of seven. Day dawns late down in Cataract Canyon, but even spring nights in Arizona are chill, and one’s own soft-woven bedding, cedar-bark mat and rabbit-skin blanket, suffuse a warmth one would not willingly forego. But,—“Lanso,” whispers grandfather Sinyella, “up and run toward the daylight. Run, that you grow straight and lusty. And heed me; take your torch and touch it to your elbows and your wrists that you may never be rheumatic as I, your relative. Oh yes, and as you turn back, fling the torch behind you, turn once again and snatch it up, that your memory may be strong too, that you may remember quickly a forgotten deer charm when you go to hunt.”
Lanso leaves his creekside home, worms his way among the slender cotton-woods, and emerging on the race course, drops into a dogged trot through the deep sand. The race course—but that is a place for a mad, scrambling dash; perched with brothers, and sisters too, on the bare back of father’s horse. What need to run afoot: foot races come at dance time, and that will have to wait until the harvest is in. Dance time—Lanso hums the songs. “Yes, I know them all; next time I, too, will dance....”