Читать книгу The Flute of the Gods - Marah Ellis Ryan - Страница 9

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“My daughter:––his people he does not know.”

“My father:––no one but the winds have told him––yet he knows much! He has said to me the things by which I feel that he knows unseen things. I told him long ago that the stars as they touch the far mesa in the night are like the fires our people build to light our god back from the south. Yesterday he tells me he wants to be the builder of that fire and serve that god. My father in this strange land:––my son belongs to the clan whose duty it is to guard that fire! I never told him. Those Above have told him. I have waited for a sign. The gods have sent it to me through my son––we are to go across the desert and find our people.”

“It is a thing for council,” decided her host. “The way is far to the big river,––it is not good that you go alone. Men of Ah-ko will come when they hear us stamp the foot for the time of the gathering of the snakes. When they come, we will make a talk. If it is good that you go, you will find brothers who will show the trail.”

“That is well;” and Mo-wa-thé arose, and stood before him. “You have been my brother, and you have been my father, and my son shall stay and see once more the rain ceremony of the Blue Flute people, and of the Snake people, and when he goes to his own land, he can tell them of the great rain magic of the Hopi Priests.”

“He can do more than that,” said the Ancient. “In council it has been spoken. Your son can be one of us, and the men of the Snake Order will be as brothers to him if ever he comes back to the mesa where the Sun Father and the Moon Mother first looked on his face. In the days of the Lost Others, all the people had Snake Power, as they had power of silent speech with all the birds, and the four-foot brothers of the forests. Only a few have not lost it, and the Trues send all their Spirit People to work with that few. Your son may take back to your people the faith they knew in the ancient days.”

The Prayer Token Page 13

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So it was that the boy watched the drama of the Flute people from the mesa edge for the last time. The circle of praying priests at the sacred well; virgins in white garments facing the path of the cloud symbols that the rain might come;––weird notes of the flute as the chanters knelt facing the medicine bowl and the sacred corn; then the coming of the racers from the far fields with the great green stalks of corn on their shoulders, and the gold of the sunflowers in the twist of reeds circling their brows. He did not know what the new land of his mother’s tribe would bring him, but he thought not any prayer could be more beautiful than this glad prayer to the gods. Of that prayer he talked to Mo-wa-thé.

Then eight suns from that day, he went from his mother’s home to the kiva of the Snake Priests, and he heard other prayers, and different prayers, and when the sun was at the right height, for four days they left the kiva in silence, and went to the desert for the creeping brothers of the sands. To the four ways they went, with prayers, and with digging-sticks. He had wondered in the other days why the men never spoke as they left the kiva, and as they came back with their serpent messengers for the gods. After the first snake was caught, and held aloft for the blessing of the sun, he did not wonder.

He had shrunk, and thought it great magic when the brief public ceremony of the Snake Order was given before the awe-struck people:––It had been a 17 matter of amaze when he saw the men he knew as gentle, kind men, holding the coiling snake of the rattles to their hearts and dance with the flat heads pressed against their painted cheeks.

But the eight days and nights in the kiva with these nude, fasting, praying men, had taught him much, and he learned that the most wonderful thing in the taming of the serpents was not the thing to which the people of the dance circle in the open were witness. He was only a boy, yet he comprehended enough to be awed by the strong magic of it.

And of that prayer of the serpents he talked not at all to Mo-wa-thé.

And the Ancient knew it, and said. “It is well! May he be a great man––and strong!”

From a sheath of painted serpent skin the Ruler drew a flute brown and smooth with age.

“Lé-lang-ûh, the God of the Flute sent me the vision of this when I was a youth in prayer,” he said gently. “I found it as you see it long after I had become a man. On an ancient shrine uncovered by the Four Winds in a wilderness I found it. I have no son and I am old. I give it to you. Strange white gods are coming to the earth in these days, and in the south they have grown strong to master the people. I will be with the Lost Others when you are a man, but my words here you will not forget;––the magic of the sacred flute has been for ages the music of the growing things in the Desert. The God of the Flute is a god old as the planting of fields, and a strong god of the desert places. It may be that he is strong to lead you here once more to your brothers on some day or some night––and we will be glad that you come again. For this I give the flute of the vision to you. I have spoken. Lo-lo-mi!”

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