Page:The gilded man (El Dorado) and other pictures of the Spanish occupancy of America.djvu/208

194 that the drum is not heard sounding some noon, with the shrill notes of the long reed-pipe, and the rhythmical minor song of the exclusively male chorus. The dancers come marching into the plaza in pairs, a man and a woman, the former always with bare chest and shoulders, and the latter "modestly" half-clothed. All are elaborately painted, often disfigured in the most fearful manner with rainbow-colored stripes on their faces and bodies. They wear, according to the occasion, rude colored masks, or feather ornaments only, or animals' heads, or colored head-dresses of wood. And thus they dance and sing and drum and play till the sun sets, even though the weather be freezing or stormy. They return dripping with perspiration to the house, and place themselves right before the blazing fire unclothed. Colds, coughs, and catarrhs follow, but the next week they go again to the laborious ball, for it is a matter of duty, and, then, the new colds they catch are supposed to drive away the old ones Similia similibus curantur.

I once attended between the 22d of February and the 8th of March four different dances in Zuñi amongst the descendants of those Indians of Cibola whom Coronado visited. Yet the chroniclers of his campaign have not a word to say of these festivals and ceremonies which are so curious to the whites. The silence is easily accounted for. The dances, which are now as many curious survivals of a condition that formerly extended over all America, were then customary among all the Indians of all Mexico, as they now are in the pueblos alone, and were therefore well known to the Spaniards. The historians