Page:The Moki snake dance.djvu/39

 On the rocky side of the mesa are thriving peach orchards, perfectly free from blight or insect enemies, and in the proper season loaded down with luscious fruit of which the Mokis are extravagantly fond. A few cottonwoods among the fields, the peach trees, and the cedars along the mesa sides, are all the trees to be seen. These cedar forests are to the Moki towns what a vein of coal is to a civilized town—the fuel supply always getting farther away and harder to reach, because the annual growth of a desert cedar is almost imperceptible. Though veins of coal peep out in many places near the pueblos, the Mokis do not use it, although they seem to have known what coal is long before our wise men settled the question; the native name for it is "rock wood," koowa, a word which resembles our word coal. The score or so of fruits, grains and vegetables which the Mokis plant would, in favorable seasons, cause peace and plenty to reign in Tusayan, but Moki history has some sad tales of famine. When the crops fail, the "good people" of necessity fall back on the crops of nature's own sowing in the desert. Old people still gather a plant for greens, which they say has before now preserved the tribe from starvation. Dried bunches of this plant may often be seen ornamenting the rafters of their dwellings, amidst a medley of other curious things. The fare of the pueblo is eked out in ordinary times with edible roots,