CHRISTMAS IN THE PUEBLOS

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chanting in a sort of authoritative monotone, as it
were a priest's, drew out of the houses many jost-
ling human shapes whom one divined, though one
could not see them. And after all, that was just a
Teniente, summoning all San Felipe men to pick
corn for the Cacique tomorrow. Doubtless the
preparations for this feast we were about to wit-
ness had begun several days ago, for so it is with
Indian ceremonies. Doubtless—since they are al-
most always thus heralded—the Crier had appeared
on a flat roof and chanted a traditional song very
close to the one literally translated by Fewkes as
follows:

All people awake, open your eyes, arise,
Become children of light, vigorous, active, sprightly.
Hasten clouds from the four world quarters;
Come snow in plenty, that water may be abundant when
summer comes;
Come ice, cover the fields, that the planting may yield
abundance,
Let all hearts be glad!
The knowing ones will assemble in four days;
They will encircle the village dancing and singing songs—
That moisture may come in abundance.

Yet now that the day had come, this Christmas
Eve which was to show us, we hoped, such a strange
mingling of pagan and Christian creeds and cere-
monies—well, tonight there was no fire, no light,
even in the houses, no stir in the streets as the car

wound through. The village might have been a
prehistoric place, dug out of an archeologist's
trench. Dead. Uncanny. Silent. It was only the
brightness of the heavens that illumined the cube-
like shapes of the houses, the long blocks, with low
flat-roofed upper stories, terraced back, built as by
a child's fancy about the small plazas. The poet
driving the car felt his way along. Here was the
church at last, a long rectangular bulk of white
adobe, with two oddly molded towers on the front,
lit by the stars. No light in the door. No candles
shining out—

We came to a stop by an orchard wall, and the
boys took the wood we had brought and made a
little fire on the mesa. With thermos bottles and
sandwiches and blankets, Pueblo fashion, over our
heads, we might hope to keep warm till midnight—
by the flash light, not so long away. It was incredi-
ble that just in this frosty spot, two years ago, seek-
ing the shadow from the intolerable glare of the
first day of May, I had watched the Corn Dancers
moving down toward the church. The apple bloss-
soms were sweet in the air, and the sun burned so
fiercely that every red-gold cottonwood along the
Rio Grande seemed a flame lighted by its rays.
Sandia mountain, a dim cloud-like thing tonight,
over there across the river, was blue as a jay's
wing that morning—

Courtesy of Museum of New Mexico

“STRIKE YE OUR LAND WITH CURVED HORNS”

The Buffalo dance, like other Indian ceremonies, is almost always held sacred from the white man's camera. This is one of the few photographs ever taken