Page 166 - TheHopiIndians

158 MESA FOLK OP HOPILAND

sounds it in the water to the four cardinal points.
Meanwhile sunflowers and cornstalks have been
brought to the spring by messengers. Each priest
places the sunflowers on his head and each takes two
cornstalks in his hands, and the procession, two
abreast, forms to ascend the mesa. A priest draws on
the trail with white corn meal a line and across it
three cloud symbols. The Flute children throw the
offerings they hold in their hands upon the symbols
and advance to the symbols, followed by the priests
who sing to the sound of the flutes. The children pick
the offerings from the ground with sticks held in the
hand, and the same performance is repeated till
they stand again in the plaza on the mesa before the
cottonwood bower, when they sing melodious songs,
then disperse.
The Flute legend, of which the ceremony is a drama
tization, relates that the Bear and Snake people in
early times lived along the Walpi. The Horn and
Flute people came that way and halted at a spring.
Not knowing whether other people lived in their neigh
borhood, they sent out a spy who returned and re
ported that he had seen traces of other peoples. The
Flute people set forth to find them, and so they came
to the Walpi houses, halting at the foot of the mesa
and moving up the trail, as in the ceremony, with songs
and the music of flutes.
The Walpi people had drawn a line of meal across
the trail, closing it from all comers, and demanded