After the modelling would come the question whether the irregularities of surface were to be left ribbed or made smooth by scraping with the sharp edge of a bit of gourd, or of a broken shard, or fragment of obsidian. Jars are found with the roughnesses of the coils inside, and the outer surface carefully smoothed, but the commoner practice was the reverse of this, and indeed the Pueblo people showed at a very early stage their love of ornament by using a great variety of devices in the spiral coils. Thumb-nail indentations in regular patterns probably made one of the first of such decorative adjuncts. Sometimes the coil is crimped throughout the whole surface, and again the body of the vessel will be smoothed and the coils left only upon the shoulder and collar. More and more elaborate patterns, wave-like or of incised lines, or overlapping in scale design, were invented and varied in a multitude of ways. The next innovation was modelling in relief, and this was soon followed by painting. Black appears to have been the first pigment discovered, and the black-and-white pottery is considered the oldest; but it could not be long before an artist living in a land of color would wish to use color on the light surface of jars, and would begin to reproduce designs familiar in natural objects. Such ornament followed closely in the footsteps of basketry and textiles. Meander patterns and geometric adaptations of rectilinear outlines were employed in both arts in an infinite variety of designs.[258] Dr. Holmes thinks that very little decoration was invented outright and that, like the forms of pottery, it originated in copying natural objects such as the exquisite shells, whose surfaces are “embellished with ribs, spines, nodes and colors.” “Clay,” he says, “is so mobile it can be made to record or echo a vast deal of nature and of co-existent art.”[259] The conch-shell may have suggested, to the imaginative mind of the native artist, spiral forms of vessels, as well as the convenient addition of handles, and also must have helped the painter to adapt rectilinear lines to the curved surfaces of the jars. Colors were always used symbolically as well as decoratively on every kind of vessel, whatever its material. While watching a potter at Ácoma I was interested to notice that the first delicate hair-lines around the lip of a jar were never quite closed together. The space left was so tiny it would not be noticed as an imperfection, and it was most illuminating afterward to read that Cushing was told by a Zuñi woman that this little unfilled space was “the exit trail of life and being.” Cushing goes on to say that when at length a pot is dried, polished, and decorated, the potter will tell you with an air of relief that it is a “made being,” and her statement is confirmed as a sort of article of faith when you observe that as she places the vessel in the kiln she also places in and beside it food.[260]