Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/392

360 us, loath to relinquish at the last the scant comfort of human companionship.

In the light of the lore which had been imparted to me many years ago by my medical teachers here at Yale, I reckoned him the victim of malaria; and shortly, in fact, quinine had cured him. The demon was exorcised, the spirit ceased to whisper, the sun was again his friend, and the winds began anew to breathe to him their wonted biddings to the chase. The grateful soul, now eager to be away, was urgent that I should visit his people, for he was fain to celebrate the facility of the white medicine man who could banish evil spirits without rattle, dance, or chant. And so I went. Eighty miles across the desert from any settlement, down at the bottom of a rock-walled chasm which leads into the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and whose sides tower sheer half a mile, these brown-painted folks have lived alone and almost forgotten since long before the Spanish pioneers came hither for God and gold some centuries ago.

At the time of my visit several persons in the tribe were ill, and a celebrated medicine man had been summoned from afar in council over the stricken ones. After long and repeated conferences, my dark medical brothers consented to lay aside cherished forms of professional etiquette, and permitted me to take a place in the grave circle which at midnight crouched about a small fire built in the open, near which lay, half naked, the group of patients. One of these was clearly the prey of consumption; one was shivering with malarial poisoning; one was a croupy child; one I judged to have partaken unwisely and too much of spoiled jerked meat; and one was the victim of old age. I have not time to picture for you, as I should like to do, the weird scene which was enacted there from midnight until dawn, night after night. A low rhythmic chant rising and falling to the time of a rattled gourd; slow passes of the hands over the prostrate bodies, which now and again were blown upon from the pursed lips of the painted Æsculapius, who now crouched crooning beside his charges, now danced furiously about them, while at frequent intervals wild yells from the attending circle woke hideous echoes from the cliffs. I will not dwell upon the sequels of this adventure, but remind you only that the conceptions of disease which these people foster, and the practices which they adopt to free the body from what is to them a definite possession by some evil thing, are essentially those which were prevalent ages ago, and whose significance we glean so toilsomely to-day out of the misty and broken records of the past.

I have lingered in story on the threshold of this address, because I wish to emphasize the fact that in this country and to-day—in all countries of the world, for that matter—a large