Great River. Paul Horgan

whatever might come. The ground before the houses was empty and clean, dazzling in the light. What would break the silence, and release the bodies full of prayer?

      It was a thunderclap which came suddenly and rocked from wall to wall, in the voice of the drums. The drums told the thunder what to do; and thunder, born of storm, would bring rain.

      At once the first dancers came like creatures of the air out of the door in the flat roof of the ceremonial chamber; and at the same instant song began and the drums sounded with it. The chorus appeared from between two houses and came to the plaza.

      Then the dancers came, great ranks of them, the men in front, the women behind them, led by a man holding a long pole into the air, decorated with eagle feathers that spoke to the sky, as from one cloud to another. They all advanced as slowly as a shadow from a high cloud on a still day; but they never ceased their movement. The men pounded the stamped ground. The women padded softly upon it. The men commanded nature. The women waited to receive it. Slowly the long columns reached out and out into the dancing-ground until they were all seen. They crossed it. They faced and returned. The chorus and the drummers sang and beat without falter. Everyone was exactly together in rhythm and action. The evolutions of the dancing and singing groups were made so gradually and in such slowly changed relation to one another that they seemed like the slow wheeling of the stars overhead at night.

      In their right hands the men held the rattles of dried gourds containing seed pods or pebbles. With these at intervals they clattered upon the ground the sound of seeds falling; and again they showered together upon the earth the sound of falling rain.

      In their left hands the men and women carried bunches of eagle feathers which like those on the banner that towered above them and went with them in their grave evolutions invoked the clouds of the sky.

      In their left hands the women carried pine boughs; and pine boughs were bound upon the arms of the men. These were a prayer for everlasting life, for the pine tree was always green.

      The men proclaimed by their presence the seed, and invoked it, and wet it, pounding their power into the earth, and ordered that it live and grow.

      The women impassively like the earth itself showed by their presence how the seed was received and nurtured.

      With their pine boughs spaced throughout the ranks, they looked like a little forest. Advancing powerfully against the light they were like a movement of the earth in an analogy of slow time. The voices of the singers barked together and made order out of the sounds of the animal kingdom. The arms moved, the legs rose and fell, the bodies travelled in such unanimity and decorum that they all seemed like a great woven construction, something man-made, some vast act of basketry, the parts tied and yet flexible in supple buckskin; again, moving against the sidelines, they seemed like a cliff advancing; or if the watchers shut their eyes and only listened for a moment, they heard the singing voices clapping flatly back from the facing houses, and the clatter of seeds, the swipe of rain, the breeze of pine trees, the rattle of little shells tied to costumes, and in all of it the spacious and secret sound of the sky into which all other sounds disappeared and were taken to the gods.

      All day long the insistent pounding of the prayer went on.

      The clowns—koshare—played about the undisturbed edges of the formal dancing groups. They were painted white, with here and there a black stripe. They were naked, and used their nakedness in comic outrage and in joking punishment of generative power. They leaped and ran. They now went soberly by the dancers and jogged like them and then broke away to enact a burlesque at a corner of the dancing-ground. A little boy or two, painted like them, capered along with them learning the mocking idiom of the people’s self-critics. Against so much work and preparation and proper devoutness in the great dance, it was necessary to send a different kind of prayer through the antics of the koshare—all the things the people knew about themselves but would not say separately. Fun included hurting. About that there was nothing odd. Much of life hurt.

      The masked gods moved with the men.

      The singers and drummers, massed closely together, turned and changed formation, now into a solid square, now a circle, but so slowly that the watchers hardly saw the change take place, but only realized it the next time they looked. The drums smote the air every time the dancing feet charged the ground with the day’s stern message, in beat, beat, beat. Every now and then, as dictated by the words of the chant, and the phases of prayer, the whole united government of bodies and voices and shaken air would suddenly break, missing a beat, and break again, missing another, making a clap of silence, a falter like a loss of light, a chasm in design, until, still in absolute union, legs, arms, voices, drums would resume the steady pounding by which the power of that town was driven, beat, beat, beat, into the earthen and airy body of nature.

      And the whole day long it pounded.

      According to the season, the dance took its theme from different gods. With them all, it practiced imitation of nature to influence nature. The rainbow dance with its arches of willows carried by women suggested rain as the rainbow could never appear in a dry sky. The turtle dance reminded the powers of water, for water came with turtles. The corn dance showered the sound of seeds and rain on the ground. The parrot dance with its blaze of feathers woven on costumes made nature think of the warm south where the parrots lived, and the hot sun, also, which made crops grow. The eagle dance, in which men soared along the ground with eagle wings tied to their arms, reminded of how strong an eagle was, and how such strength could cure anything. Before huntsmen set out, the dance would imagine and predict success for them—sometimes in the deer dance, with men garbed in deerskin and hunted down by other dancers as heroes; or the antelope, the elk, the buffalo, all costumed accordingly, and full of respect for the habits of the beloved adversary and victim who would be brought to death in order that the people might live. In the animal dances, little boys sometimes went costumed as bobcats and coyotes, jogging under the dancing bodies of men who impersonated deer or buffalo. Sometimes a boy dancer was a turkey, bridling and flaring with a suit of feathers.

      To imitate was to induce, in gesture, sound and article.

      To impersonate was to become.

      To endure ordeal was to know not exhaustion but refreshment.

      For when evening came the dancers, the singers and drummers were not tired. They were stronger than ever. They were lifted up. In giving they had received. The great ranks ended their slow stately evolutions, and the men retired to the kiva. The women sought their houses. The chorus broke formation and entered the kiva. The clowns went trotting lazily over the town. They capered benignly now. Dwellers came forward from their rooms and breathing upon corn meal dusted it into the air before the clowns who took the tribute with a kindly bend of painted nakedness. The spectators drifted to their rooms.

      Such a pueblo typically sat on an eminence above the river, and near to it. The river was a power which like the light of the sky was never wholly lost. It came from the north beyond knowing, and it went to the south nobody knew where. It was always new and yet always the same. It let water be taken in ditches to the lowest fields. Trees grew along its banks—willows, cottonwoods, young and old, always renewing themselves. The water was brown, as brown as a body, and both lived on earth as brown. The river was part of the day’s prayer.

      Evening came down over the west, like thin gray smoke pulled over color, and the evening star stood like a great trembling drop of water on the soft darkness of the sky.

      Before daylight was all gone, the pueblo was silent but for the little sounds of ordinary life—voices lost in narrow walls, a dog, someone breaking branches for firewood, children. The twilight was piercingly sweet and clear. The river went silent and silken between its low banks where grasses grew and saplings and little meadows sprung up out of mudbanks. Sky and town and valley were united in deep peace after the hard wonders of the dancing day. And at that hour the men of the dance came through the sapling groves to the river. The deepening yellow dusk put color on the water. The men came in their ceremonial dress. They took it off and went naked to-the river’s edge. There they breathed upon the pine boughs which they had worn, and the baldrics of rabbit fur, and sometimes the gourd rattles, and cast them upon the sliding surface of the water. They sent their prayers with the