OF THE JOURNEY OF TAHN-TÉ
The journey of Tahn-té to his mother's land of the East was the wonder
journey of the world! There were medicine-men of Ah-ko for their
guides, and the people were many who went along, so no one was afraid
of the Navahu of the hill land.
And a new name was given to his mother. Ho-tiwa gave her the name, and
put on her head the water of the pagan baptism to wash away that which
had been. The new name was S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah and it meant the "Woman
who has come out from the mists of a Shadow or Twilight Land." And
they all called her by that name, and the men of Ah-ko regarded her
with awe and with respect, and listened in silence when she spoke.
For the first time the boy saw beyond the sands of the desert, and in
the high lands touched the running water of living springs, and
scattered meal on it with his prayers, and bathed in the stream where
green stems of rushes grew, and braided for himself a wreath of the
tasselled pine.
"_Ai-ai!_" said his mother softly,--"to the people of my land the pine
is known as the first tree to come from the Mother Earth at the edge
of the ice robe on her bosom. So say the ancients, and for that reason
is it sacred to the gods--and to the sacrifices of gods. Have you, my
son, woven a crown of sacrifice?"
But Tahn-té laughed, and thrust in it the scarlet star blossom growing
in the timber lands of the Navahu.
"If I am made sacrifice I will have a blood strong, living reason," he
said, with the gay insolence of a young god walking on the earth.
But the older men did not smile at the bright picture he made with the
blood-red stars in the green of his crown. They knew that even untried
youth may speak prophet words, and they made prayers that the wise
woman of the twilight land might not see the day when her son became
that which he had spoken.
He carried with him a strange burden:--an urn or jar of ancient days
dug from one of the buried cities of the Hopi deserts. On it was the
circle of the plumed serpent, and the cross of red and of white. It
was borne on his back by a netted band of the yucca fibre around his
brow, and in it were young peach trees, and pear trees--the growing
things of the mystic seeds given to the medicine-men of the Hopi the
day of the boy's birth.
Seeds also were being carried, but it was the wish of the mother that
her son carry the growing things into the great valley of the river
P[=o]-s[=o]n-gé.
Even into the great rift of the earth called Tzé-ye did he carry it,
where the cliff homes of the Ancient Others lined the sides of the
cañon and the medicine-men of Ah-ko spoke in hushed tones because of
the echoing walls, and of the strong gods who had dwelt there in the
days before men lived and died.
"The dead of the Ancient ones are hidden in many hollow places of the
stone," explained one of the men who spoke the language of Te-hua
people. "And it is good medicine for the man who can walk between
these walls where the Divine Ones of old made themselves strong. You
do not fear?"
[Illustration: BLOOD-RED STARS IN THE GREEN OF HIS CROWN _Page 18_]
"I do not fear," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah, the woman of the twilight,
"and my son does not fear. Before he was born to the light of the Sun
Father, I made the trail from the level land of the west where the
snow is, to the deep heart of the world where the plants have blossoms
in winter time, and the birds sing for summer. Beside it this deep
step down from the world above is like the thickness of your finger
against the height of a tall man."
The men stared at her in wonder, and Tahn-té listened, but could not
speak when the older men were silent.
"There is such a place," said the oldest of the men. "It is to the
sunset. The water comes strong there, and it is a place of the gods,
as this place is. And you have seen it with your eyes?"
"I have seen it, and the water that is so strong looks from the top
like this reed of this ancient dwelling place," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah,
and she pointed to the waving slender lattice grass of the cañon.
"I have heard of it, but our people do not cross it in these days,"
said the old man. "Our friends the Te-huas cross it--and cross a
desert beyond when they go to the Love Dance of the Chinig-Chinik who
live by the sunset sea. In my youth I thought to go, but old age is
here and I have not yet seen it." Then after an interval of thoughtful
silence he said:--"You have crossed that river in the heart of the
world--I did not know that women went to the Love Dance."
"I can not tell you. I also do not know," said S[=aa]-hanh-que-ah
quietly, and the boy saw that the eyes of all the men were directed
strangely to his mother. "I do not belong to the Order from which the
people are sent to the Dance of Love or the Dance of Death. My eyes
have not seen the waters of the sunset sea."
"Then you did not go beyond the river in the heart of the rocks?"
asked the old man. "You did not cross over?"
"I did cross over. I have seen the sands of that far desert of which
you speak. I have seen the trees of which one leaf will cover a man
from the sun, and more leaves will make a cover for a dwelling. I have
seen the water run there at the roots of those trees as this water
runs in the shadow of this rock, and--ai!--ai-ah! I have seen it sink
in the sands when it was needed most--and have heard it gurgle its
ghost laugh beneath the hot trail where the desert lost one
wandered."
Her head bent forward and her hands covered her eyes. The boy wanted
to ask where this place was of which he was hearing so much for the
first time. What was there in the wonderful journey of the wise woman
to make the tears come and her voice tremble? But the old Shaman of
Ah-ko reached out his hand and touched her bent head.
"It is true, my daughter of the Te-hua, that the Snake priest of the
Hópitû told in council that high medicine was yours. Yet all he could
not tell me. You have lived much, oh woman! Yet your heart is not
hard, and your thoughts run clear as the snow water of the high hills.
It is well that you have come with us, and that you have talked with
us. When the hidden water mocks with laughter so far beneath the
desert sand that no man lives to reach it:--then it is that men die
beside the place their bleeding hands dig deep. You have heard that
laughter, and have lived, and have brought back your child out of the
sands of death. It has given you the medicine for your son that is
strong medicine. You have lived to walk with us and that is well."
"Yes, thanks this day, it is well," said the other men.
At Ah-ko, "the city of the white rock," the silent, shy Medicine-Woman
of the Twilight and her son were feasted like visiting rulers of a
land.
To his wonder they sang songs of thanks that the gods had let her come
to them once again, and they asked that she make prayers with them.
The woman with whom the rain and the sweet fruit had come to the far
desert was a woman to be feasted and propitiated--all the more that
she disclaimed aught of the divine for herself; but when they spoke of
her son she was silent. His life was his own in which to prove what he
might be.
Here he saw no girls with the head bands for their burden of water
bottles as in Tusayan. He saw instead the beautifully poised vases on
the heads of the women while they paced evenly over the rock of the
mesa or the treacherous sand hills, and the great walled reservoir of
shining green water was a constant source of delight to him. Eight
times the height of a man was the depth of it, and at the very bottom
in an unseen crevice was the living spring pulsing out its heart for
the long line of women who brought their decorated jars to be filled.
The evening of their arrival he found his mother there in the shadow
of the high rock walls.
"Are you sad, my mother, that you walk alone and sit in the shadow?"
he asked, but she shook her head.
"I come because this place of the deep water is precious to me," she
said. "Make your prayer here, my son, make your prayer for the people
who thirst in the desert of this earth life. There are many deserts to
cross, and the enchanted hills and the enchanted wells of content are
but few on the trail."
He made the prayer, and scattered the sacred pollen of the corn to the
four ways, and again took up his query.
"The enchanted mesa Kat-zi-mo I have seen and already the men have
told me its story," he said. "But of this well there is no story
except that in the ages ago the water was brought high with the wall,
and when the Apache enemies came, the people could not starve for
water even while the fighters fought a long time. That is all the
story--there is no magic in that."
"There is always magic in the waters of the desert," and the Woman of
the Twilight. "One other time I drank of the water of this well. It
was enchanted that time, for every moving light and shadow on its face
have I remembered all the days and all the nights. Give me to drink of
it now with your own hands, and it will be then precious for two
reasons."
He did as she said, and wanted to ask of that other time and could
not.
"Thanks this day, thanks for my son," she said and sprinkled water to
the four ways and drank. "Not again shall I see you--oh joy place in
the desert! Give your magic to my son that he may carry it to the free
running water of his own land!"
In Tusayan his mother had been to him Mo-wa-thé, the pottery maker who
made the finest of all vessels, but on the wonder trail in the new
lands he found that she was strangely learned. And when she spoke of
the place of the well on the high mesa and said it was precious for
magic there, he walked silent and awed beside her, for the magic world
held the Great Mystery, and only through prayer must it be spoken.
He knew that his lot was more fortunate than that of any other boy
alive, an the long trail where each night around the camp fire the men
told tales of the Ancient days when gods walked on the earth and
taught wisdom to the people. Each tribe had its own sacred truths
given by its own gods, and he was learning of many. In the great cañon
of Tzé-ye--the abiding place of the Navahu Divine Ones, he had heard
with awe of the warrior boy gods who were born of the Sun and of the
Goddess Estsan-atlehi and set out to slay the terrific giants of evil
in the world. But the medicine-men of Ah-ko were quite sure that the
Ancient Ones of their own race had proof that the Supreme Power is a
master mind in a woman's form. It is the thing which thinks and
creates, and her twin sister is the other mind which only remembers.
Prayers must not be said to the goddess who only remembers--but many
prayers belong to the goddess who creates. And the most belovéd of all
is the goddess E-yet-e-ko (Mother Earth) who nourishes them all their
days. He learned that they planted their corn and their cotton by the
stars and the plum blossoms, in the way his mother said they did by
the river of her land, also that the great bear of the stars was
called by them the great animal of cold weather, and that the Sun had
eight children, or wandering stars in the sky.
He heard many more things, but the wisdom of it was too deep for a boy
to know, and the words of the symbols were new, and not for his
understanding. How big--how very big the world of the Tusayan desert
had seemed to him as he stood on the mesa of Wálpi and looked to the
south where old Awatabi (the high place of the Bow) stood in its
pride, and rugged Mishongnavi with her younger sister Shupaulevi
against the sky, so beautiful, that the sacred mountain Dok-os-lid of
the far away, looks sometimes like a cloud back of those villages, and
sometimes like the shell of the big water from which its name was
taken.
But all those wonderful Hopi mesas with their fortresses on each, were
within the running time of a morning, and not in any of them were
there forests or living streams, or strange new things. Only the
clouds and the shadow of the clouds on the sand,--or the sun and the
glory of the sun on the world, made the heart leap with the beauty of
the land of the Hopi people. But here were new things each day.
When the boys of Ah-ko in friendly rivalry ran races and leaped great
spaces, and shot arrows into a melon with him--and then ate the
melon!--they asked how many years he had lived and he laughed and did
not know.
"I had so many," he said holding up the fingers of both hands and
pointing to his eyes,--"When I followed your men down the trail from
Wálpi in Hopi land. But I have seen so much, and lived so much that I
must be very old now!"
This the boys thought a great jest, and said since he was old he could
not run races, or see straight to shoot, and he must let himself be
beaten. But the boys who tried to beat him were laughed at by the old
men who watched, and he was given a very fine bow to take on his
journey, and never any boy crossed those lands so joyously as he who
carried all the way the growing sprouts of the new trees.
And at Ah-ko a little tree from the urn, and some of the seeds were
given, but the winter to come was a hard winter, and the ice killed
them, so the fruit from the strange far-off trails was not for Ah-ko.
They had rested, and were about to depart, when Tahn-té, watching with
other boys the war between two eagles poised high above the enchanted
mesa, saw on the plain far below the figure of an Indian runner, his
body a dark moving line against the yellow bloom spread like a great
blanket of flowers from Mount Spin-eh down and across the land.
He only watched because the man ran well--almost as well as a
Hopi--and did not see in the glistening bronze body the herald of a
new day in the land.
At the edge of the cliff they watched to see him appear and disappear
in the length of the great stairway of the fortress. Some day each boy
among them would also be a runner in his turn for ceremonial reasons,
and it is well to note how the trusted men make the finish.
It is not easy to run up the two hundred foot wall of Ah-ko at the end
of a long trail, but this man, conscious of watchers, leaped the last
few steps and stood among them. Only an instant he halted, in surprise
face to face with the boy Tahn-té who stood nude and fair beside dark
companions.
Tahn-té was accustomed to the curious regard of strangers who visited
the country of Tusayan. He had heard so often that he was a child of
the sky that this explanation of his fairer skin seemed to him a very
clear and logical explanation of the case.
But after the runner had been listened to by the governor and fed, and
a herald from the terraced housetop had called aloud the startling
message brought by him to the people of Ah-ko, the boy went away from
the other boys, and wrinkled his brows in boyish thought, and stared
across to the ancient crater of Se-po-chineh until his mother sought
him, and found him.
"You are weary, my son, that you come alone from the others?"
"The others only talk yet tell nothing," he said gloomily, "and of
that which the runner tells I wish to hear much. You hear what he says
of white men like gods who come from the south searching for the blue
stones and the stone of the sun fire, and taming strange beasts to
carry them on their way?"
"Yes, it is true, I hear," she said.
"And you think it is magic? Is it that they are gods--or demons--or
men like these men?"
"If they were gods would they not know where the stones of the
sunlight are hidden in the earth?"
"Are they children of the moon or the sun, or the stars that they are
white?" he demanded.
"It may be so," she said very lowly, conscious that his gloomy eyes
were trying to make her see what he felt, but she must not see, and
she spoke with averted head.
Then he rose and stood erect and stretched out his arms their widest
and surveyed himself with measuring gaze and a certain pride, but the
other thought came back with its gloom and he laughed shortly with
disdain of himself.
"I have felt stronger than all the boys--always! Do you know why that
has been? I know now why--it was because I stood alone,--I was the
only child of the light and I dreamed things of that. Now a man tells
us there are many such people, and their magic is great, and my
strength goes because of the many!"
His mother stroked his hand reassuringly. "Na-vin (my own)," she said
steadily. "I have felt your dreams, and I also dream them. Fear no one
born of the light or of the darkness, and when you are a man you will
have all your strength--and more than your own strength."
"You say that, my mother?"
She held her head erect now and looked straight and steadily into the
eyes of her son.
"I say it!"
And he remembered that it was more than his mother who spoke, it was
the Medicine Woman of the Twilight and of the strange places, and the
far off thoughts.
He lifted her hand and breathed on it. "I am again Tahn-té," he said,
and smiled. "You make me find myself!"