st. Fifteen
hundred souls there are, living in the hillside tiered-town, where you
may see the transition from Indian to white in the substitution of
downstairs doors for the ladders that formerly led to entrance through
the roof.

[Illustration: _Copyright by H. S. Poley_

A Hopi Indian weaving a rug on a hand loom in a deserted cave]

Out at Acoma, with its 700 sky dwellers perched sheer hundreds of feet
straight as arrow-flight above the plain, you can count the number of
doors on one hand. Acoma is still pure Hopi. Only one inhabitant--Marie
Iteye--speaks a word of English; but it is Hopi under the far-reaching
and civilizing influence of "Marmon and Pratt." The streets--1st, 2nd
and 3rd, they call them--of the cloud-cliff town are swept clean as a
white housewife's floor. Inside, the three story houses are all
whitewashed. To be sure, a hen and her flock occupy the roof of the
first story. Perhaps a burro may stand sleepily on the next roof; but
then, the living quarters are in the third story, with a window like the
porthole of a ship looking out over the precipice across the rolling,
purpling, shimmering mesas for hundreds and hundreds of miles, till the
sky-line loses itself in heat haze and snow peaks. The inside of these
third story rooms is spotlessly clean, big ewers of washing water on the
floor, fireplaces in the corners with sticks burning upright, doorways
opening to upper sleeping rooms and meal bins and corn caves. Fancy
being spotlessly clean where water must be carried on the women's heads
and backs any distance up from 500 to 1,500 feet. Yet I found some of
the missionaries and government teachers and nuns among the Indians
curiously discouraged about results.

"It takes almost three generations to have any permanent results," one
teacher bewailed. "We doubt if it ever does much good."

"Doubt if it ever does much good?" I should like to take that teacher
and every other discouraged worker among the Indians first to Acoma and
then, say, to the Second Mesa of the Moki Reserve. In Acoma, I would not
be afraid to rent a third story room and spread my blanket, and camp and
sleep and eat for a week. At the Second Mesa, where mission work has
barely begun--well, though the crest of the peak is swept by the four
winds of heaven and disinfected by a blazing, cloudless sun, I could
barely stay out two hours; and the next time I go, I'll take a large
pocket handkerchief heavily charged with a deodorizer.