Translator’s Introduction
Deep down in canyons of the Southwest, especially where they are joined by other canyons, the traveller may see standing forth from or hugging the angles of the cliffs, great towering needles of stone—weird, rugged, fantastic, oftentimes single, as often—like gigantic wind-stripped trees with lesser trees standing beside them—double or treble. Seen suddenly at a turn in the canyon these giant stones startle the gazer with their monstrous and human proportions, like giants, indeed, at bay against the sheer rock walls, protecting their young, who appear anon to crouch at the knees of their fathers or cling to their sides.
Few white men behold these statuesque stones in the moonlight, or in the gray light and white mists of the morning. At midday they seem dead or asleep while standing; but when the moon is shining above them and the wanderer below looks up to them, lo! the moon stands still and these mighty crags start forth, advancing noiselessly. His back is frozen, and even in the yielding sand his feet are held fast by terror—a delicious, ghostly terror, withal! Still he gazes fascinated, and as the shadow of the moonlight falls toward him over the topmost crest, lo, again! its crown is illumined and circled as if by a halo of snow-light, and back and forth from this luminous fillet over that high stony brow, black hair seems to tumble and gather.
Again, beheld in the dawn-light, when the mists are rising slowly and are waving to and fro around the giddy columns, hiding the cliffs behind them, these vast pinnacles seem to nod and to waver or to sway themselves backward and forward, all as silently as before. Soon, when the sun is risen and the mists from below fade away, the wind blows more mist from the mesa; you see clouds of it pour from the cliff edge, just behind and above these great towers, and shimmer against the bright sky; but as soon as these clouds pass the crag-nests they are lost in the sunlight around them—lost so fast, as yet others come on, that the stone giants seem to drink them.
Of such rocks, according to their variety and local surroundings, the Zunis relate many tales which are so ingenious and befitting that if we believed, as the Zunis do, that in the time of creation when all things were young and soft and were therefore easily fashioned by whatever chanced to befall them—into this thing or that thing, into this plant or that plant, this animal or that, and so on endlessly through a dramatic story longer than Shakespeare or the Bible—we would fain believe also as he does in the quaint incidents of these stories of the time when all things were new and the world was becoming as we see it now.
One of these tales, a variant of others pertaining to particular standing rocks in the west, south, or east, is told of that wonder to all beholders, “El Capitan,” of the Canyon de Chelly in the north. No one who has seen this stupendous rock column can fail to be interested in the following legend, or will fail to realize how, as this introduction endeavors to make plainer, the Zuni poet and philosopher of olden times built up a story which he verily believed quite sufficient to account for the great shaft of sandstone and its many details and surroundings.