Voyage By Dhow by Norman Lewis Page A

be baptized, and they would be lost to the Huichol race.
    A little later the Vespers bell rang, and the mestizos came riding down the trails to attend the service; men, as Lorca would have said, with their mouths full of flints, slender and saturnine, and dressed in cowboy style with big sombreros and leather chaps. They doffed their hats as they passed, and the shaman gave them the easy smile that hid an implacable antagonism. These men were nothing. They had the souls of the mules they rode, he said. As an example of what they were capable of, he said that they bought and sold land—the most irreligious of all acts in the eyes of a communistic Huichol.
    The image of proselytizing Christianity as seen through an Indian’s eye was hard to refute. The record of the missions in the Americas is at best dismal, and at worst makes painful reading indeed, and, whatever the purity of their motives, the Franciscans must share the blame for the degeneration of the Indians of California, and for their final disappearance from the scene. Christianity has too often been administered as a sedative—something as deadly in practice as raw alcohol—designed to keep the fighting Indian quiet and persuade him to turn the other cheek while his destruction was being prepared. At Santa Clara, however, the mission offered a phenomenon that was new, at least to me; the spectacle of love, not only preached but put into practice. Here at last, and for the first time, I saw Indians as the early explorers and colonizers saw them, before the assassinations began; gentle, friendly, and brimming over with laughter.
    It was early evening with a resplendent sky full of toucans and parakeets, and soft lemon light. The girls had finished their domestic chores, and the boys had come down from the forests dragging wood on sledges for the fires; now they collected in little groups, curious and smiling round our hut. They were of all the ages of childhood. Some of them had the faces of little Eskimos, while others could have been European gypsies; and yet other faces were totally and unmistakably Mexican from the temple bas reliefs in the ruined cities of the south. What astonished me again was that the Franciscans had allowed them to dress in pure Indian style, with all the Indian gods embroidered across well-laundered clothing. Some of the boys had guitars and Huichol violins, and it seemed that we were to be serenaded, but despite the encouragement of the girls, who kept up a vigorous pentatonic humming, the musicians turned out to be too shy to entertain us with more than a few strummed bars.
    The shaman sat apart, writing with a ball-point pen in his notebook. Although illiterate by the standards of the West, he recorded the day’s events and the flow of his own inspiration, just as a pre-Columbian Aztec might have done, in a series of vigorous ideographs. Now he interrupted his writing to criticize the feebleness of the musical performance. He was opposed to witchcraft but this was one field in which the end justified the means. A Huichol parent who wanted his son to be a first-class musician normally sent him in the charge of an enchanter to the place where the magic arbol del viento grew. For three days and three nights the pupil would sit and listen to the wind in the branches, and then he played. When he returned home not a violinist could equal him. What was that tune that one of the older boys was scratching out so feebly? I told him it was ‘Silent Night’.
    David had had the splendid notion of bringing a Polaroid camera along to help break the ice on such occasions, and now he performed the important magic act of producing snapshots of a number of these beautiful children. The impact of instant photography was interesting to watch. Tension mounted with the stripping of the paper from the print and the laughter died from the faces leaving pure awe. The subject, clutching his or her portrait, would back away with it, trembling with excitement,