Jim had kept up a steady stream of narrative all the way to Second Mesa, probably trying to ease her way into this expedition. He'd been like a tour guide, spouting information. Meg had learned that the Hopi were the only Shoshonean people ever to adapt to pueblo life and that, like the Tewa of New Mexico, they kept pretty much to themselves on a series of three mesas in the striped sandstone hills that marked their reservation. She had learned that the Hopi, a culture as foreign to the Navajo as Meg's own, had lived surrounded by the larger Navajo nation for centuries, that Oraibi and Shongopovi were among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements on the continent, and that some of the most finely crafted pottery ever made came from these mesas. She'd also learned about the dances themselves: that the Hopi believed in Emergence; they knew this as the Fourth World and taught that the ancestors of the modern Hopi had climbed up through the sky of the third world to emerge into this one at a sacred place somewhere near here, known only to initiated members of the tribe; that the snakes were messengers, children of the Snake Maiden and the Snake Hero who were born human and then transformed into reptiles and who now served the purpose of carrying messages from the people to the gods of the natural world.
