m.

Picture a grey mass of rock rising up abruptly above the desert, bare of
tree or shrub; scattered over its irregular top, blocks of two and three
story stone and dried brick houses, for the most part square in outward
shape, with steps on the outside built into the wall, or heavy ladders
with long projecting ends resting upon platforms built in front of small
square topped doorways, the roofs flat and covered with dried grasses.
No stairways within these houses permitting passage from lower to upper
rooms, and all built after century old architectural plans, by the hands
of women. Between the blocks of irregular houses picture rectangular
slabs of stone rising two feet above the ground, containing an opening
in the middle out of which project high in the air the two ends of a
hard-wood ladder, the rungs of which have been worn almost through by
the passage of naked feet that have pressed up and down on these bits of
wood for scores of years. It is not easy to imagine the real fact that
down in those upstairs cellars the men of Oraibi lead their club life,
weaving down there in the dim light that filters past the ladder, the
rugs and belts and other material mysteriously used for religious
ceremonial. And down in the snake priests' kiva, just over yonder, the
venomous reptiles have been kept for weeks past in the sacrificial clay
jars, out of which they have crawled during the rites of their
purification and hung in twisted hissing knots out of the crevices
between the sides of the kiva walls, from which places the brown hands
of old Thisdoa, Talavenka's father, have only this morning taken them to
put in the cottonwood booth out on the village plaza, where they are now
awaiting their part in the coming ceremony. For old Thisdoa is the head
priest and knows more of the mysteries of the snake nature than any
being in Oraibi.

The sun is just on the edge of the desert. All traces of the morning
storm are vanished. Out on the tops of the houses all about the open
plaza, groups of men and women begin to appear, the unmarried girls
distinguished from the married by the graceful whorls of black hair
standing out in marked contrast with the two rolls that hang down past
the ears of the matrons. Cowboys, Navajo horsemen, traders, all the
non-acting part of Oraibi's population, tourists, photographers,
visitors, crowd up in a rainbow coloured fringe about the sandy
depression which now contains only one conspicuous object, t