You see, he had walked in on their level, prodding his patient beasts, covered with the desert dust, a wondrous simplicity on his face. He had touched the Hopi heart. He could have told one things of the Hopi people—but the opening guns of the Great War summoned him away to die at Verdun. Know ye the trail that the Salt bands go? Close by the Rock where they carved their names? Know ye the hills of the Navajo And the barren sands that the Hopi claims? Dim in the cañons of the dead, Where the towns are dust and the last scalp dried, Their swords are rust, and the desert crow Scarce can tell where the Spaniard died. Slain at Zuni and Cañon de Chelly, [2] By the Mesa Black and at Santa Fe; One of them killed by a Pecos clown, One of them dropped by Walpi town. —Song of the Spanish Bell The Hopi live in northern Arizona, surrounded by the reservations of the Navajo. They speak a Shoshonian dialect, and are often miscalled Moqui. The Department for forty years libeled them under this misnomer. Moqui is a Hopi term, and has been used against them by Navajo to signify anything inert, unpleasant, cowardly, dead. The dignified Navajo has another distinct title for the Hopi, and uses it when filled with courtesy. Moqui is probably a Keresan word originally, since it is found as “motsi” in Cochiti and San Felipe pueblos of the Rio Grande, whose warriors and rebels fled to the Hopi country for sanctuary after the rebellion of 1680. Near the centre of that huge space on the Arizona map marked “Moqui Reserve” are the Hopi towns. These were known to the Spanish conquistadores as the Seven Cities of Tusayan. There are now nine pueblos. In that early hour of geologic time when the receding waters carved the great gorges in the face of northern Arizona, the more resistant sandstones and clays and coals were left as shattered cliffs, and from these reach out many bony headlands—long fingers, at the crumbling tips of which, like villages clinging to a rocky coast, are the eyries of the Hopi. Below them, as sea-floors, are the sandy valleys and drifting dunes of the Painted Desert. These nine little towns are set oddly in groups of three, and so are the Hopi divided, quite as into three distinct provinces. Three are balanced on the narrow backbone of the First Mesa, a knife-like projection that rises hundreds of feet above the valley, and is at one place not more than twenty feet in width. These are old Walpi, beloved of etchers, and Tewa of the warriors, and Sitchumnovi. Three are built on the broad mounds of the Second Mesa, known as Machongnovi, Chepaulovi, and Chimopovi. And perhaps the oldest and certainly the youngest of the villages are at Third Mesa—Oraibi, the aged; and tiny Bacabi; and redolent, sullen Hotevilla.