It is the sort of outing that true sons of Arizona enjoy. Carl Hayden, of Congress, has kept one eye on a Snake Dance and both ears open to Hopi conditions. Governors Hunt and Campbell have been found there repeatedly, and Governor Hunt has sought to preserve its record in pictures for the State Capitol at Phoenix and the museum of the University of Arizona at Tucson. In these men the Hopi have had good friends, and at least one Moungwi found them filled with understanding of the Desert and its peculiar conditions. At Walpi one has a fit setting for a theatrical ceremony. Roosevelt wrote of it, “In all America there is no more strikingly picturesque sight.” The place of the dance is a narrow shelf at the very edge of the mesa. The houses of the people, tier on tier, terraced into little balconies, form a back-drop. Through these houses, and leading from the shelf, a tunnel gives on to another street. The ledge is simply a continuation of the rock roadway that skirts the brink of the village, overhanging the wide First Mesa Valley. There is a sheer drop from this edge, straight down at least sixty feet, to the masses of shattered stone and drifted sand that buttress the mesa and shelve off hundreds of feet more into the orchards. At each end of this shelf is an underground kiva, marked by its projecting ladder-poles. A curiously eroded rock seems to balance at one end of the little plaza, between the houses and the precipice. Before Walpi was evolved for purposes of defense, this rock existed. Probably it was because of this freak that the place was selected for the rites of the tribe. The ground-area available to spectators and dancers measures about ninety feet in length and not more than thirty in width. This approximate twenty-seven hundred square feet must contain about forty Indian actors and a large percentage of the mob, to say nothing of the snakes, a most important and active feature of the meeting, among which are many rattlers. It is like staging a nervous ballet on the cornice of the Woolworth Building, knowing that fifty mice will be turned loose on signal. The wisest of the visitors seek places on the balconies and housetops; but not all of them can be accommodated there. Many are forced, if they would see anything, to stand on the ledge with the dancers. Dense groups mass at each end of the plaza and along the house-walls, and men and boys, white and red, stand four-deep on the outer edge, facing the snakes, and with a death-drop behind them. A tourist who would hesitate about hunting a rattlesnake out of a bush will at this time develop courage beyond all understanding.