ons are
followed by cavalry on the finest of mounts, and near the leader rides
the priest. Sword and cross rode grandly in together; and up to 1700,
sword and cross went down ignominiously before the fierce onslaught of
the enraged Hopi. I confess it does not make much difference to me
whether the Spaniards were hurled to death from this mesa--called
Enchanted--or that other ahead there, with the village on the tip-top of
the cliff like an old castle, or eagle's nest. The point is--pagan
hurled Christian down; and for two centuries the cross went down with
the sword before savage onslaught. Martyr as well as soldier blood dyed
these ocher-walled cliffs deeper red than their crimson sands.

Then out of the romantic past comes another era. The Navajo warriors
have obtained horses from the Spaniards; and henceforth, the Navajo is a
winged foe to the Hopi people across Arizona and New Mexico. You can
imagine him with his silver trappings and harnessings and belts and
necklaces and turquoise-set buttons down trouser leg, scouring below
these mesas to raid the flocks and steal the wives of the Hopi; and the
Hopi wives take revenge by conquering their conqueror, bringing the arts
and crafts of the Hopi people--silver work, weaving, basketry--into the
Navajo tribe. I confess it does not make much difference to me whether
the raid took place a minute before midday, or a second after
nightfall. I can't see the point to this breaking of historical heads
over trifles. The point is that after the incoming of Spanish horses and
Spanish firearms, the Navajos became a terror to the Hopi, who took
refuge on the uppermost tip-top of the highest mesas they could find.
There you can see their cities and towns to this day.

And if you let your mind slip back to still remoter eras, you are lost
in a maze of antiquities older than the traditions of Egypt. Draw a line
from the Manzano Forests east of Albuquerque west through Isleta and
Laguna and Acoma and Zuni and the three mesas of Arizona to Oraibi and
Hotoville for 400 miles to the far west, and along that line you will
find ruins of churches, temples, council halls, call them what you will,
which antedate the coming of the Spaniards by so many centuries that not
even a tradition of their object remained when the conquerors came. Some
of these ruins--in the Manzanos and in western Arizona--would house a
modern cathedral and seat an audience of ten thousand. What were they:
council halls,