THE faculty of observation was never highly developed
in Thea Kronborg. A great deal escaped her eye as
she passed through the world. But the things which were
for her, she saw; she experienced them physically and re-
membered them as if they had once been a part of herself.
The roses she used to see in the florists' shops in Chicago
were merely roses. But when she thought of the moon-
flowers that grew over Mrs. Tellamantez's door, it was as
if she had been that vine and had opened up in white flow-
ers every night. There were memories of light on the sand
hills, of masses of prickly-pear blossoms she had found in
the desert in early childhood, of the late afternoon sun pour-
ing through the grape leaves and the mint bed in Mrs.
Kohler's garden, which she would never lose. These recol-
lections were a part of her mind and personality. In Chicago
she had got almost nothing that went into her subconscious
self and took root there. But here, in Panther Canyon,
there were again things which seemed destined for her.
Panther Canyon was the home of innumerable swallows.
They built nests in the wall far above the hollow groove in
which Thea's own rock chamber lay. They seldom ven-
tured above the rim of the canyon, to the flat, wind-swept
tableland. Their world was the blue air-river between the
canyon walls. In that blue gulf the arrow-shaped birds
swam all day long, with only an occasional movement of
the wings. The only sad thing about them was their tim-
idity; the way in which they lived their lives between the
echoing cliffs and never dared to rise out of the shadow of
the canyon walls. As they swam past her door, Thea often
felt how easy it would be to dream one's life out in some
cleft in the world.
From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified,
unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter,--like
the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the
sun,--but always present, a part of the air one breathed.
At night, when Thea dreamed about the canyon,--or in
the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating
it,--her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in
sunlight, the swallows, the cedar smell, and that peculiar
sadness--a voice out of the past, not very loud, that went
on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally.
Standing up in her lodge, Thea could with her thumb
nail dislodge flakes of carbon from the rock roof--the
cooking-smoke of the Ancient People. They were that
near! A timid, nest-building folk, like the swallows. How
often Thea remembered Ray Kennedy's moralizing about
the cliff cities. He used to say that he never felt the hard-
ness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he
felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made
one feel an obligation to do one's best. On the first day
that Thea climbed the water trail she began to have intui-
tions about the women who had worn the path, and who
had spent so great a part of their lives going up and down
it. She found herself trying to walk as they must have
walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins which
she had never known before,--which must have come up
to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky trail. She
could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her
back as she climbed.
The empty houses, among which she wandered in the
afternoon, the blanketed one in which she lay all morning,
were haunted by certain fears and desires; feelings about
warmth and cold and water and physical strength. It
seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those
old people came up to her out of the rock shelf on
which she lay; that certain feelings were transmitted to her,
suggestions that were simple, insistent, and monotonous,
like the beating of Indian drums. They were not expressi-
ble in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves
into attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or
relaxation; the naked strength of youth, sharp as the sun-
shafts; the crouching timorousness of age, the sullenness of
women who waited for their captors. At the first turning
of the canyon there was a half-ruined tower of yellow
masonry, a watch-tower upon which the young men used
to entice eagles and snare them with nets. Sometimes
for a whole morning Thea could see the coppery breast
and shoulders of an Indian youth there against the sky;
see him throw the net, and watch the struggle with the
eagle.
Old Henry Biltmer, at the ranch, had been a great deal
among the Pueblo Indians who are the descendants of the
Cliff-Dwellers. After supper he used to sit and smoke his
pipe by the kitchen stove and talk to Thea about them.
He had never found any one before who was interested in
his ruins. Every Sunday the old man prowled about in the
canyon, and he had come to know a good deal more about
it than he could account for. He had gathered up a whole
chestful of Cliff-Dweller relics which he meant to take
back to Germany with him some day. He taught Thea
how to find things among the ruins: grinding-stones, and
drills and needles made of turkey-bones. There were frag-
ments of pottery everywhere. Old Henry explained to her
that the Ancient People had developed masonry and pot-
tery far beyond any other crafts. After they had made
houses for themselves, the next thing was to house the
precious water. He explained to her how all their customs
and ceremonies and their religion went back to water. The
men provided the food, but water was the care of the wo-
men. The stupid women carried water for most of their
lives; the cleverer ones made the vessels to hold it. Their
pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope
and sheath of the precious element itself. The strongest
Indian need was expressed in those graceful jars, fashioned
slowly by hand, without the aid of a wheel.
When Thea took her bath at the bottom of the canyon,
in the sunny pool behind the screen of cottonwoods, she
sometimes felt as if the water must have sovereign quali-
ties, from having been the object of so much service and
desire. That stream was the only living thing left of the
drama that had been played out in the canyon centuries
ago. In the rapid, restless heart of it, flowing swifter than
the rest, there was a continuity of life that reached back
into the old time. The glittering thread of current had a
kind of lightly worn, loosely knit personality, graceful and
laughing. Thea's bath came to have a ceremonial gravity.
The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic.
One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool,
splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big
sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her
draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite
dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken
pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a
sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the
shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying
past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to
lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the
sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been
caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made
a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's
breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.
Read next: PART IV. THE ANCIENT PEOPLE#Chapter 4
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