across the room upon the sand mosaic, knocking down the crooks and other
objects placed about it. As they fell on the sand picture, three Snake
priests stood in readiness, and while the reptiles squirmed about or
coiled for defense, these men with their snake whips brushed them back
and forth in the sand of the altar. The excitement which accompanied
this ceremony cannot be adequately described. The low song, breaking
into piercing shrieks, the red-stained singers, the snakes thrown by the
chiefs and the fierce attitudes of the reptiles as they lashed on, the
sand mosaic, made it next to impossible to sit calmly down and quietly
note the events which followed one another in quick succession. The
sight haunted me for weeks afterward, and I can never forget this
wildest of all the aboriginal rites of this strange people, which showed
no element of our present civilization. It was a performance which might
have been expected in the heart of Africa rather than in the American
Union, and certainly one could not realize that he was in the United
States at the end of the nineteenth century. The low, weird song
continued while other rattlesnakes were taken in the hands of the
priests, and as the song rose again to the wild war cry, these snakes
were also plunged into the liquid and thrown upon the writhing mass
which now occupied the place of the altar. Again and again this was
repeated until all the snakes had been treated in the same way, and
reptiles, fetishes, crooks, and sand were mixed together in one confused
mass. As the excitement subsided and the snakes crawled to the corners
of the kiva, seeking vainly for protection, they were pushed back in the
mass, and brushed together in the sand in order that their bodies might
be thoroughly dried. Every snake in the collection was thus washed, the
harmless varieties being bathed after the venomous. In the destruction
of the altar by the reptiles, the snake ti-po-ni (insignia) stood
upright until all had been washed, and then one of the priests turned it
on its side, as a sign that the observance had ended. The low, weird