"Beautiful!" said Aunt Maria. "That court is absolutely swept and dusted.
One might give a ball there. I should like to hear Lucretia Mott speak in
it."
Her reflections were interrupted by the courteous gestures of a
middle-aged, dignified Moqui, who was apparently inviting the party to
enter one of the dwellings.
Pepita and the other two Indian women, with the wounded muleteers, were
taken to another house. Aunt Maria, Clara, Thurstane, and Phineas Glover
entered the residence of the chief, and found themselves in a room six or
seven feet high, fifteen feet in length and ten in breadth. The floor was
solid, polished clay; the walls were built of the large, sunbaked bricks
called adobes; the ceilings were of beams, covered by short sticks, with
adobes over all. Skins, bows and arrows, quivers, antlers, blankets,
articles of clothing, and various simple ornaments hung on pegs driven
into the walls or lay packed upon shelves.
"They are a musical race, I see," observed Aunt Maria, pointing to a pair
of painted drumsticks tipped with gay feathers, and a reed wind-instrument
with a bell-shaped mouth like a clarionet. "Of course they are. The Welsh
were always famous for their bards and their harpers. Does anybody in our
party speak Welsh? What a pity we are such ignoramuses! We might have an
interesting conversation with these people. I should so like to hear their
traditions about the voyage across the Atlantic and the old mill at
Newport."
Her remarks were interrupted by a short speech from the chief, whom she at
first understood as relating the adventures of his ancestors, but who
finally made it clear that he was asking them to take seats. After they
were arranged on a row of skins spread along the wall, a shy, meek, and
pretty Moqui woman passed around a vase of water for drinking and a tray
which contained something not unlike a bundle of blue wrapping paper.
"Is this to wipe our hands on?" inquired Aunt Maria, bringing her
spectacles to bear on the contents of the tray.
"It smells like corn bread," said Clara.
So it was. The corn of the Moquis is blue, and grinding does not destroy
the color. The meal is stirred into a thin gruel and cooked by pouring
over smooth, flat, heated stones, the light shining tissues being rapidly
taken off and folded, and subsequently made up in bundles.
The party made a fair meal off the blue wrapping paper. Then the meek-eyed
woman reappeared, removed the dishes, returned once more, and looked
fixedly at Thurstane's bloody sleeve.
"Certainly!" said Aunt Maria. "Let her dress your arm. I have no doubt
that unpretending woman knows more about surgery than all the men doctors
in New York city. Let her dress it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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