PUPPETS THROUGH AMERICA
should see such a figure do not imagine he is a cowboy—no,
he is an artist or a poet indulging in the emotional intoxica-
tion that seizes such fish in this operatic world. I like it.
I had a pair of blue jean pants myself, but—I could not
afford the silver.
From the busy bazaar of Santa F£ we moved out, by the
pretty adobe Indian school, to the austere, desiccated desert
again, changed this side of the town to a flatter country with
strange, flat-topped hills, and red rocks appearing among the
pink and golden. Somewhere about thirty miles before us
lay the pueblo of Santo Domingo, and we drove on over the
uninhabited llanoy over the sun-baked clay soil, scrubby with
a sparse, wiry growth. It was hot and strange, an endless
primitive world of shining, brilliant beauty exulting in the
quivering sunlight.
We turned from the highway and took a rough track over
the sand, bumping among the cacti and the sage-green scrub
until suddenly we saw the Indian village below us, the lines
of clay houses round large squares, a clay town set in the
arid sands, baking in the open sun, with no sign of cultiva-
tion near it. But below the village is the river and the Indian
corn, and on the other side the mountains rise to the forests.
We bumped on down the hill, over a wide arroyo, winding
down to a large dusty plaza, where the car was parked with
hundreds of others. We walked under the high, blank walls
of the clay church, joined a stream of Indians and tourists
and passed under some cottonwood trees where a gaudy
group of Indians were displaying their pottery for sale. The
faint throb of a drum was in the air—the Indians were
dancing.
In the village an incredibly bright crowd thronged the
dusty ways between the squat clay houses. The tourists
were in their brightest, the cowboy artists in their bravest,
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