A body was buried in rock shelters or under piled rocks in the open. Its limbs were gathered against itself and bound. A few of its meagre possessions were placed with it—things to work with and to pray. Woven fibre matting was wrapped around all, and where at last it lay, a blanket of cactus leaves, thick and bristling with sharp needles, was put to protect and cover all. On a flat rock face near-by was a picture that said “Hand,” and meant “Forever.”
Below, in its rocky trough, the river went on and presently—not very far off—was joined by another big river from the north—the Pecos of today. The two streams came along the flat sides of a great rock wedge that ended sharply, like a stone hatchet. They went on as one river when they met below the hatchet edge.
All along the river there were wandering people, even at the coast where the brown water went into the green sea. People travelling inland followed rivers, and those by the sea followed the shore. Out of Mexico went travellers up along the coast, coming to the mouth of the river, crossing it, and going on beyond to see what they could find. The travellers met trouble at times, for the people who roved the great vaporous sea-plain were hostile. They were naked hunters, always moving, and they attacked not only animals but people, and when they made any kill, they ate of it. Otherwise on the sandy plain where the sky all day long changed from thick to thin and back again, there was little to be had except roots in the sand and food from the sea. They snatched the white crabs of the beach and fished in the surf and in the end-waters of the river that passed through empty wilderness to meet the tide.
In news that came to the river pueblos from travellers who had seen, or heard, all of it, there was little of any other cities that lived anywhere else along the river. Towns at the river’s mouth were made of sand grasses that blew away in hurricane or fell down dry if the rovers left them for long. A few dug-out pits roofed with yucca stalks clung to the river in the middle desert (southeast of the site of El Paso) whose people grew corn and went to the buffalo plains to hunt. But it was much harder country than the pueblo valleys up north—rockier, hotter, barer, dryer. Sometimes the desert part of the river failed to run. Its mountains were too far away to renew it. It was, there below, a river to cross, not to live along. The pueblo people were the only ones, with their many towns up and down the green, gold, blue, black and pink valley of their world, to whom the river through a thousand years gave continuing life, and connection with one another.
People from the farthest north pueblo, Taos, which was on a plateau too high for the growing of cotton, came south to the central towns below the volcanic canyons of the river, where the land forms stepped down immensely and the farms lay two thousand feet lower in altitude, and traded for cotton cloth.
During November men from the red rocks and plains of the west came on travels to see dances and to make trades, and went home again to their own towns, that were made of shale and mud plaster.
Other travellers, the Navahos, wandered with the seasons, and sometimes reached the western edge of the river world. If fixed with the spirit of war, they struck, thieved, and fled. If at peace, they threw up their mud cells, like wasps’ hives, and dwelled in them awhile. If someone died in a Navaho hut, it was fearfully abandoned and a new one built by the survivors. The house meant nothing in itself. Thus, neither did a town, or a place. The Navaho moved, always just ahead of his hunger and his fear.
Stable, relatively secure amidst all such movements and motives, the river people received the trails as they were made, and maintained themselves at home by their work, their search for harmony with the visible world, and their endless propitiation of forces of whose existence they dreamed but whose nature they did not know.
ix. personality and death
Imprisoned in their struggle with nature, the people sought for an explanation of the personality they knew in themselves and felt all about them, and came to believe in a sorcery so infinitely distributed among all objects and creatures that no act or circumstance of life was beyond suspicion as evil or destructive. Neighbors might be trusted; but they had also to be watched in secret, for who knew who among them might finally turn out to be a witch? If every object, every animal, every man and woman quivered with the same unseen personal spirit, to whom prayers might be said, and of whom in anxiety blessings could be asked, then they could also and with terrible swiftness turn out to be agents for evil. Long ago, they said, the young war gods Masewi and Oyoyewi, the powerful twins, lived amongst the people, and protected them by killing witches and giants. Nature was vast and people were little and danger was everywhere. But (in the universal canon of faith which brings to every Goliath his David) there was the very cast of hope in the people who imagined their survival and triumph in the midst of menace, then willed it, and even by implausible means achieved it.
But at great cost.
Anyone suspected of sorcery was put to death, often in secret, often by individuals acting without formal sanction. What would identify a witch? A vagrant idea in someone’s head; a dream (for dreams were always seen as truth, as actual life encountered by the spirit freed from the sleeping body); a portent in nature; perhaps a conspicuous act, aspect or statement, anything too unusual, too imaginative in unfamiliar terms; persistent misfortune or sickness among the people which must be blamed upon someone—the notion could come from anywhere. If only one or two people knew of the witch, he might be secretly killed. If everyone suspected him and knew about him, he would be accused and pressed to confess. In their search for a victim the people sometimes fixed upon an ancient person who had outlived his family and, obtaining a confession through torture, exiled him to another pueblo or simply killed him. Sometimes people in one town would discover a witch in another town who was causing them grief, and would murder him virtuously. Retaliation, inspired by the highest motives, would follow. The killing of witches at times reached such numbers that whole towns were nearly wiped out by it.
Otherwise believers in peace, and calm, measured life, the people sanctioned their only outbreak of violence in connection with punishment of witches, whose machinations, they said, threatened the communal safety of life. Was that very communality itself an expression not so much of the dignity of men and women as their fear—a fear which put them always on guard, created a propriety of the commonplace, and held as its core a poisonous distrust of one another? The old people told the children that no one could know the hearts of men: there were bad people—witches—everywhere. Evil resided in them, and never came from the gods. The gods were exempted from doubt or blame. All believed so and, believing, all followed the same superstitions in the same strength of mind. Such strong beliefs, laced through with such compelling fears, created a personality common to the people as a whole.
Men went out during the night to encounter the spirits at sacred sites. They went in fear and returned trembling, whatever their experience, for they went to garner omens for themselves. Going home from the shrine they must not look behind them, no matter what might seem to be following them. They would consider gravely before they would tell what they had encountered, for what had been gained could be lost if not kept secret. It would not be a sin to tell—there was no guilt in the people since they were not responsible for what nature did to them—but in telling a secret, new power against menace might be lost. Ordeals were spiritual rather than physical. Endurance of torture was demanded only of witches.
The personality had many private faces, each with a new name. A man had his name given at birth as a child of the sun. When he joined a kiva, he received another, and another when he entered any organization, and he was nicknamed after his various duties and kinds of work. The personality was renewed and purified by ritual acts, such as vomiting. Before all ceremonial dances, all taking part were required to vomit in the early morning for four days (four was a powerful number in all ways). They said that those who vomited breathed differently from those who had not. “After you vomit four days you’re