Edward Whittemore - Nile Shadows

The Indian turned and walked away. They followed him a short distance and came upon three burros standing behind a boulder, the creatures as immobile in their solitude as the Indian had been before them.

Preposterous, muttered Ming.

The three of them mounted the burros and the ascent began up a path cut into the face of the cliff, led by the Indian on foot. Higher and higher they climbed, the twisting ledge often no more than a few feet wide, the drop to the side falling off hundreds of feet to the desert below. As they worked their way upward the golden sheen of the rocks receded and the dark vistas beneath them spread out with ever greater mystery, until by the time they reached the summit of the mesa the faint glow on the horizon, the last of the dying sun, had left but a shadowy dimness to the air.

They slid to the ground amidst low adobe shapes built one on top of another, in what appeared to be the central courtyard of the pueblo. While they were dusting themselves off and straightening their clothes, their Indian guide drifted away with the burros. There was no sign of life anywhere in the village.

Not exactly what you'd call being piped aboard, whispered Ming. Is it possible we've come several hundred years too late?

They may all be at vespers, whispered Little Bill. In a setting such as this, a huggermugger at sundown would definitely seem to be in order.

But why are we all whispering? whispered Big Bill.

He squinted through the darkness and pointed.

Isn't that the kiva over there?

In the center of the courtyard a mound of fitted stones rose four or five feet above the surface of the ground, what appeared to be the roof of an underground chamber. Protruding from an opening in the top of the mound was the end of a ladder. They climbed up to the ladder and lowered themselves, one by one, down through the opening into the interior of the mound.

The underground vault they had entered was round and spacious with smooth walls of stone. In the middle of the chamber stood a low unadorned altar, and in front of the altar a lone Indian sat crosslegged on the ground, cloaked in a blanket. The chamber was roughly divided in half, the semicircle where the Indian sat having a lower floor level than the side where they had descended and now found themselves standing awkwardly, their disheveled linen suits filthy from the climb up the face of the cliff, their Panama hats bashed and askew. Here and there torches hissed on the walls, casting uneasy shadows.

The Indian watched them impassively, his dark skin deeply etched with lines. His hair was long and greasy, what little of it showed beneath a thick wool hat squashed down to his ears, a hat that might have been bright red once but was now badly faded by time and the elements. Although crudely woven by hand, the hat didn't seem to be of local manufacture. Instead it gave every appearance of being the product of some hovel-industry in the Old World, the meager handiwork of an aging peasant laboring in perpetual rain and twilight. In Ireland, perhaps.

The impression given by the hat was vaguely disquieting to the three visitors. Peaked front and back and pulled down over the Indian's head at a raffish angle, it suggested nothing so much as the shoddy costume of an itinerant frontier trickster eager to unload worthless bottles of some all-purpose health tonic, fortified with gin and laudanum, in exchange for valuable furs.

As for the Indian's outer garment, the threadbare khaki blanket covering him from neck to ankle, it was so worn and tattered it looked like a campaign relic from another century, and indeed, a legend stamped on its edge stated that it had originally been issued for use among Her Majesty's forces in the Crimea, 1854. Of course the blanket was immediately recognizable to the three men, having been prominently mentioned in their intelligence files as a souvenir from the Home for Crimean War Heroes in Jerusalem.

As soon as they were off the ladder and standing together, the Indian made a gesture commanding silence. Another gesture and the three of them were sitting in a row facing him and the altar, higher than he was both because he was such a small man and because of the lower level of the floor on his side of the chamber. They watched him as he reached under his blanket and brought out something in a closed fist. Solemnly the Indian thrust his fist in the air and muttered a guttural incantation, then dropped his fist and moved it sideways with a tossing motion.

From up to down. From left to right. The Indian was throwing cornmeal at them, sprinkling them with cornmeal. And as he did so, strangely, he seemed to be making the sign of the cross in the air.

His face still stern, the Indian reached under his blanket again and this time brought out a flat papery corn husk, together with a handful of rough homegrown tobacco. Deftly he rolled a thick cigarette, struck a wooden match on the sole of his bare foot and put the flame to the end of the cigarette, which flared briefly. The Indian puffed several times and handed the loose cigarette over to his three visitors, who drew on it in turn, coughing and sputtering. The Indian nodded and took the cigarette back. Abruptly he smiled, speaking in a soft Irish voice.

. . takes getting used to, I guess, like life and a lot of things. And that business you've probably heard about Indians using peacepipes by way of welcome, well, it's strictly that. The business. The Hopi have always smoked their tobacco in what we'd call cigarettes. And speaking of myths, the Hopi view of creation is that the first thing ever said by anyone in the universe was simply this. Why am I here?

The Indian laughed.

. . makes sense, you say? Well you're right about that, questions generally do. They have just a lovely way of being straightforward and to the point, I know it. It's only when we try to come up with answers that we lose our way and wander, like the stars overhead. For the stars do that, don't they? Forgetting what we've been told, I mean, isn't that surely the way the heavens look? Astray and incomprehensible?

***

. . astray, muttered the Indian, and that's the truth of it. Well according to the Hopi myth of creation, those were the very first words ever spoken in the universe. Why am I here? And just maybe the longer we live, the more we feel the sense of them.

Nor do I need to tell you that this first and most basic query was spoken by a woman, the ancestress, don't you know. For the Hopi believe the first life in the void was a woman's, which also makes sense.

No strutting males for them in the beginning, because no life ever comes from us, only the living and the observing of it. Descent among the Hopi remains traditional and matrilineal, as I'm told it does in some other old societies.

Whereas my bare feet aren't poking out this way because I'm a savage, but only to show humility. The same reason I'm expected to sit in the lower half of the circle of life down here in the kiva. Among the Hopi, the more powerful you are the more humble. But I guess that's always the true way anywhere.

So to bring you rapidly up to date then, still following the Hopi view of the matter, this ancestress went on to create twins as the next step, males this time for balance, and what do you suppose were the very first words that popped into the heads of those two fellows?

That's right, just what you'd expect, the same as hers but with that added yearning for identity so common to our sex. Why are we here, certainly, but quickly right on top of that the other card in the main male riddle, the question that's always there worrying us to the grave, Who are we anyway?

So the basic human enigmas seem to dip well back in time and a sound answer on the spot has always been tricky stuff, which brings me around to us. That advance party of yours that climbed up here a couple of weeks ago didn't really say much about who you'd be when you turned up, and moreover, why you'd be turning up in the first place. So I wonder if one of you might have some thoughts on the matter?