Compared with Walpi, the first two villages are neat and tidy, their interiors whitewashed clean, and little pots of flowers almost invariably on the window sills. The Indian love of flowers impressed us everywhere. House after house we entered, to receive a soft smile of welcome from the old grandfather squatted on the floor dangling a naked brown baby, or from the grandmother, busy with a bowl of clay which she shaped and painted with quick fingers, while she talked to us through her English-speaking daughter.
In these Hopi houses, ropes of dark crimson jerked beef buzzing with flies fill the hot room with a fragrance loved only by the Indians; strings of wampum, worth sometimes two horses and a burro, rugs, native woven and of the gaudy Pendleton variety, coats, overalls, dried herbs and peppers hang from convenient beams. In another corner, in the older houses, is a row of two or three metate bins, for grinding corn, with a smooth round stone lying beside it. If one arrives during the season, he can witness the corn grinding ceremony. A Pueblo woman, loaded with beads and silver, stands behind each bin, which is filled with varied colored grains. In the corner an old man sits, beating the tombé in rhythmical strokes and singing the Song of the Corn Grinders, to which the women bend back and forth in perfect time, rubbing their flat stones over the corn. No man except the singer of the ceremonial song can be present in the room while this grinding is in process. To violate this rule is a grave offense.
Most of the houses have a small Mexican fireplace in the corner. At the side of some rooms is a loom with a half finished rug on it, but this is becoming a rare sight. The Hopis, who originally were expert weavers and taught their art to the Navajos, gradually relinquished it to the Navajos, who were able to get a superior quality of wool. Now the Hopis trade their baskets and pottery to the Navajos for their rugs, or buy the less beautiful but more gaudy commercial rugs from traders.
Being a native of Hano, our little guide hesitated to take us into Walpi. It was evident that no great love was lost between the two villages, for a reason we learned later, so we preceded him across the uneven, narrow tongue of rock which led to the tip of the mesa. The late afternoon sun lighted the stony pile with glory, and cast rich, violet shadows the length of the houses. It was almost impossible to disentangle the stairs of one house from the roof of another. Stairways terraced into the mortar of the houses led to roofs, and ladders pointed still higher.
Somehow Walpi reminded me of the little hill town of Grasse, and the old parts of San Remo, on the Riviera. There was the same tolerance toward live stock in the narrow, unevenly paved streets; there were the same outside stairways, and roofed-in alleys and houses tumbling on each other, and looking into each other’s mouths; the same defiant position on the height, watchful of enemies, the same warm stucco and brightly painted doorways. Even the dark, velvety eyed children bore out the resemblance to Italy, as they slouched against a wall, as Italians love to do. A small army of children in one or less garments was watching us from the parapets; we pointed the camera at them, and snapped. When the film was developed only one child remained,—the rest had ducked.
We met with less hospitality in Walpi than in the other two villages on the mesa. Doors were tightly closed, for the most part. A few inhabitants, mostly old women, let their curiosity overcome their pride, and called out to us. One woman was baking pottery in an oven edging the lane which was Walpi’s Main Street. She had buried it, and was raking sheep-dung over it to insure its being burned the peculiar reddish brown which the Hopis prefer in their pottery. A tiny burro wandered about at will, and the usual array of dogs yapped at us. At the great rock, the most conspicuous identifying mark in Walpi, which bisects the narrow street, and is so shaped that in a Northern country it would have to be called Thor’s Anvil, my eye was attracted by little sticks bound with feathers in the crevices of the rock. I pulled one out, and asked our guide what they were.
“Don’t know,” he shouted, in the tone he used when speaking to us, perhaps thinking it more official. His face was stolid and stupid. Of course he knew. They were, as we afterward learned, the prayer sticks used in the Hopi ceremonies for rain.
Across from Walpi, looking west over the desert, is a low long mesa. There the Indian youths go to hunt wild eaglets, to be used in the Snake Dance ceremonies. We saw a group of men, Indians and white, clustered with great interest about a rough box made of wooden slabs. As we came nearer, curious, we saw them jump quickly back, wary and respectful. A young eagle, with a heavy chain on one ankle, angry and ruffled stood at bay, its eyes gleaming red, its beak wide open and the feathers on its neck standing straight out. It was not a creature to tamper with, even chained as it was. Never have I seen anything so angry in my life. It was the embodiment of Fury, of rage that, silent and impotent as it was, stays with me ever now. How far we Easterners have traveled from the life that was a commonplace to our ancestors! Here was the creature so native to our country that its likeness is on our national coin, yet outside a zoo it was the first eagle I had seen. I only recognized it as an eagle because its feather-trousered legs looked so like the St. Gaudens designs.
Between the little painted prayer sticks in the big rock at Walpi, the long mesa on the horizon, and the captured fighting creature in the cage at Polacca, is an interesting connection. Rain, rain, is always the prayer on every desert Indian’s lips. When the spring freshets are finished, and the land lies exhausted under the metallic glow of an August sun, life itself hinges on breaking the drought. Because the eagle is the bird which reaches nearest to Heaven, and hence is most apt to carry his prayer to the gods, the Hopis make excursions to that distant mesa where eagle’s nests are still found, and bring back a young eagle. This they keep in captivity until the time approaches for the Snake Dance, which is really a dance for rain, the snake being the ancestor god of the Walpi people. Then they kill the eaglet, not by a gun or an axe, but without shedding its blood, they gently stroke its neck until it is numb and in a stupor. Then they wring its neck, and pluck out the downy feathers to wing their prayer sticks to the gods above.
