gan to chant to
the morning light. It began very soft and low, a strange, broken murmur,
like the music of a brook, and as it swelled that weird and mournful
tone was slowly lost in one of hope and joy. The Indian's soul was
coming out of night, blackness, the sleep that resembled death, into the
day, the light that was life.

Then he stood in the door of his hogan, his blanket around him, and
faced the east.

Night was lifting out of the clefts and ravines; the rolling cedar
ridges and the sage flats were softly gray, with thin veils like smoke
mysteriously rising and vanishing; the colorless rocks were changing. A
long, horizon-wide gleam of light, rosiest in the center, lay low down
in the east and momentarily brightened. One by one the stars in
the deep-blue sky paled and went out and the blue dome changed and
lightened. Night had vanished on invisible wings and silence broke to
the music of a mockingbird. The rose in the east deepened; a wisp of
cloud turned gold; dim distant mountains showed dark against the red;
and low down in a notch a rim of fire appeared. Over the soft ridges and
valleys crept a wondrous transfiguration. It was as if every blade of
grass, every leaf of sage, every twig of cedar, the flowers, the trees,
the rocks came to life at sight of the sun. The red disk rose, and a
golden fire burned over the glowing face of that lonely waste.

The Navajo, dark, stately, inscrutable, faced the sun--his god. This was
his Great Spirit. The desert was his mother, but the sun was his life.
To the keeper of the winds and rains, to the master of light, to the
maker of fire, to the giver of life the Navajo sent up his prayer:

Of all the good things of the Earth let me always have plenty.
Of all the beautiful things of the Earth let me always have plenty.
Peacefully let my horses go and peacefully let my sheep go.
God of the Heavens, give me many sheep and horses.
God of the Heavens, help me to talk straight.
Goddess of the Earth, my Mother, let me walk straight.
Now all is well, now all is well, now all is well, now all is well.

Hope and faith were his.

A chief would be born to save the vanishing tribe of Navajos. A bride
would rise from a wind--kiss of the lilies in the moonlight.

He drank from the clear, cold spring bubbling from under mossy rocks.
He went into the cedars, and the tracks in the trails told him of the
visitors of night. His mustangs whistled to him from the ridge-tops,