Page 482 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

attrition and misery to barely 10,000. Like the Ancient Maya whose
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descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the
world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little), the Hopi believe
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that we are walking in the last days, with a geological sword of Damocles
hanging over us. According to their myths, as we saw in Chapter
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Twenty-four:
The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an
all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended
when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with
ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its
fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the
Creator’s plans ...’
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I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving
in accordance with the Creator’s plans ...

The end of the world

The desolate wind, blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the
sides of the trailer-home we sat in. Beside me was Santha, who’d been
everywhere with me, sharing the risks and the adventures, sharing the
highs and the lows. Sitting across from us was our friend Ed Ponist, a
medical-surgical nurse from Lansing, Michigan. A few years previously Ed
had worked on the reservation for a while, and it was thanks to his
contacts that we were now here. On my right was Paul Sifki, a ninety-six-
year-old Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading spokesman of the
traditions of his people. Beside him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, a
handsome middle-aged woman who had offered to translate.
‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world is
coming. Is this true?’
Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, nut-brown in colour, dressed in
jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he never once
looked at me, but gazed intently ahead, as though he were searching for
a familiar face in a distant crowd.
Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her
grandfather’s reply: ‘He says, “why do you want to know”?’
I explained that there were many reasons. The most important was that
I felt a sense of urgency: ‘My research has convinced me that there was
an advanced civilization—long, long ago—that was destroyed in a terrible
cataclysm. I fear that our own civilization may be destroyed by a similar
cataclysm ...’

36 Community Profile: Hopi Indian Reservation, Arizona Department of Commerce.
Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.
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38 Book of the Hopi.
39 World Mythology, p. 26.

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