The second day at the Bridge, we drove up the Arroyo Hondo to see the Penitentes. It is the only way I know that you can personally visit a people who in every characteristic belong to the Twelfth Century. The houses of the Arroyo Hondo are very small and very poor; for the Penitente is thinking not of this world but of the world to come. The orchards are amazingly old. These people and their ancestors must have been here for centuries and as isolated from the rest of the world as if living back five centuries. The Penitente is not an Indian; he is a peon. Pueblo Indians repudiate Penitente practices. Neither is the Penitente a Catholic. He is really a relic of the secret lodge orders that overran Europe with religious disorders and fanatic practices in the Twelfth Century. Except for the Lenten processions, rites are practiced at night. There are the Brothers of the Light--La Luz--and the Brothers of the Darkness--Las Tinieblas. The meeting halls are known as Morados; and those seen by us were without windows and with only one narrow door. Women meet in one lodge, men in another. The sign manual of membership is a cross tattooed on forehead, chin or back. When a death occurs, the body is taken to the Morado, and a wake held. After Penitente rites have been performed, a priest is called in for final services; and up to the present, the priests have been unable to break the strength of these secret lodges. Members are bound by secret oath to help each other and stand by each other; and it is commonly charged that politicians join the Penitentes to get votes and doctors to get patients. Easter and Lent mark the grand rally of the year. On one hill above the Arroyo Hondo, you can see a succession of crosses where Penitentes have whipped themselves senseless with cactus belts, or dropped from exhaustion carrying a cross; and only last spring--1912--a woman marched carrying a great cross to which the naked body of her baby was bound. We passed one cross erected to commemorate a woman who died from self-inflicted injuries suffered during the procession of 1907. The procession emerges from the Morado chanting in low, doleful tune the Miserere. First come the Flagellantes, or marchers, scourging their naked backs with cactus belts and whips. Next march the cross carriers with a rattling of iron chains fastened to the feet; then, the general congregation. The march terminates at a great cross erected on a hilltop to simulate Golgotha. Why do the people do it? "To appease divine wrath," they say; but they might ask us--why have we dipsomaniacs and kleptomaniacs and monstrosities in our civilized life? Because "Julia O'Grady and the Captain's lady are the same as two pins under their skins." Because human nature dammed up from wholesome outlet of emotions, will find unwholesome vent; and these dolorous processions are only a reflex of the dark emotions hidden in a narrow canyon shut off from the rest of the world.