PERSONAL GLIMPSES

Continued

75 inches, but, as the Colonel explained, Lord Roberts's specimen was picked up after he had died of old age or something else. At any rate, it was not shot, which places it in a different category.

The Colonel says that so far as the Himalayan goats (or Ovus poli) go, Marco Polo was no liar, whatever his detractors may have said. The brothers have six Ovus poli rams, to say nothing of a number of females, shot at 15,000 to 17,000 feet in the sub-Asian Pamirs, and to get them was the main idea of the expedition. The Roosevelts regard these heads as ample reward for the 3,000 miles they did on foot in the most exciting and dangerous part of their ten months' trip. For two of these goats they stalked twelve hours on two successive days.

The Colonel and Kermit were full of stories about their trip, the difficulties they had and the enthusiasm with which they were received in vague countries north of India, in territories which really were not on the map. One of their discoveries was that throughout Kurdistan their credit was good. Their drafts were accepted almost anywhere, and checks signed by the "two princes from the United States" beat any cash they could have used except Czarist Russian rubles.

There's an Eversharp for you in any style and size you want. The one above, the popular standard gift and business model, with 18 inches of lead up its sleeve, gold-filled at

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1926, The Wahl Company, Chicago

The party leaves for London to-morrow, and will sail for New York in about a week. The two Mrs. Roosevelts joined their husbands in India several weeks before they started on the homeward trip.

HOPI SNAKE-DANCE AS A MAGNET

FOR 2,500 MOTORISTS

HE great Arizona mesa was crowded

THE

with gasoline tourists from all quarters of the country, "New York being almost as prominent as California among the many-hued number plates." Some of these travelers had been camping among the chaparral for days, waiting for the big chiefs of the Indian village half a mile away to announce when the festivities would culminate. The village itself, writes John Anson Ford in Motor Life, was worth the long trip which many of these thrillseeking motorists had made. He himself had ridden 600 miles across the desert, from Los Angeles to Chimopovy, Arizona, which he thus describes:

The Colonel refused to talk politics, saying he had been away ten months, and wished to get in touch with the situation before expressing an opinion. Both he and Kermit appeared in tip-top shape "Bully," as their father would have said.

According to an earlier Times dispatch from Chicago:

It was composed of a multitude of characteristic cubicles of adobe, varying in size with the wealth and ambition of the owner, and piled one on the other at various points to effect two-story construction. It was among these primitive dwellings that the dance was to be held-in a sort of courtyard surrounded by houses on all four sides.

The departure of the Roosevelts from India marked the end of a ten months' natural-history hunt in the wildest and most unexplored regions of Central Asia. The expedition penetrated the Russian Pamirs and Eastern Turkestan, fighting the bitter cold and traveling for weeks at altitudes ranging from 15,000 to 18,000 feet.

At length the gaudily decked red men of the village sent word that the great event for which all were waiting would occur on the following Monday at the sunset hour. The stir on Monday resembled nothing that the motorist has experienced in an ordinary tourist camp. This was a "mass movement" with a common objective-the courtyard already referred to. Long before the hour set for the climactic ceremonial (the preceding features of which held but little interest for the white man, whose presence was not wanted, anyway) one could see the curious whites walking in eager groups down the dusty trail which led by devious turns from the temporary tent city to the abode of the Indians.

When the Roosevelts began the second leg of the expedition, which took them into the central provinces and Nepal, George K. Cherrie, explorer and scientist, accompanied by Suydam Cutting, volunteer photographer, took the initial collection of natural-history specimens out through Russia via the Black Sea to Constantinople, from where it was shipped to the United States and is due to arrive

soon.

The Field Museum, of Chicago, which financed the hunting expedition, is making preparations to handle and house a great accession of valuable specimens, and it is related that

No seats were provided, but the visitors were made welcome to the bare ground at the edge of the courtyard and to the housetops. Those who shunned too intimate contact with snakes picked the roofs, and subsequent events proved the wisdom of their choice.

Following the dash into the Russian Pamirs, the Roosevelts turned their attention to the jungles of Central India and Nepal on the Tibet border. Here, with the permission of Indian and British officials, they hunted until the start of their trip home in the vast game preserves maintained by the Indian Rajahs.

The sun was slowly sinking like a great ball of fire toward the jagged sky-line off to the west. A hush almost ominous in character spread over the mesa and one by one the strangers grew silent. It was a colorful picture which this company preforming a fringe about the courtyard. The sented, covering the irregular roofs and setting sun lighted up the many-hued

scarfs of the white women and the brilliantly colored adornments of the natives, who mingled with their "uninvited guests" quite unobtrusively.

And now we read of a stir at one of the corners of the courtyard nearest the crude shelter of brush and grasses which had been erected there:

The visitors craned their necks to see what was taking place just outside the central open space, and folks asked curiously about the clump of grass and brush.

"The brush?" a sunburned woman in motorist's khaki repeated. "Oh, that is the shelter over the snake-pit. Yes," she went on, showing that she had motored out to this ceremonial in previous years, "that is where the dancers get their'snakes."

The well "tinted," immaculately manicured lady with whom she was talking

PERSONAL GLIMPSES

Continued

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spectators on top of a weather-beaten adobe wall. Curiosity makes strange benchfellows.

Presently the crowd parted to form an opening at one end of the courtyard, and in filed six braves, clad in terrifying fashion. Kiltlike skirts hung to within six inches of their knees. Their straight, black hair dropt to their shoulders and all but covered their faces, which were fearfully painted in contrasting colors. Their bodies from the waist up were bare and smeared with slate-colored paint and strange, angular lines which somehow suggested snakes, altho not resembling them. Several ounces of beads and bracelets added a primitive garishness to their attire, while their feet were clad in clumsy, ankle-high, beaded moccasins, made especially for this occasion. Fox furs hung from their waists and trailed on the ground behind them-objects of audible admiration from the feminine section of the tense audience.

In their hands these six men, whom we will designate as chanters, held queer musical instruments made of dried gourds, which were rattled continuously as an accompaniment to a slow, weird chant whose cadences rose and fell, adding tremendously to the spell of the scene. These chanters formed into line in front of the brush-covered snake-pit, their backs toward the latter.

While this stage of the ceremony was nearing completion additional braves appeared in pairs, one man behind the other. One, two, three, four pairs appeared in rapid succession, and each two men joined in a single-file circular dance.

These men were clad much as the chanters. The second of each pair was “armed" with a sort of slender feather-duster, whose purpose, as was to appear presently, was to brush the noses and yawning, fang-laden mouths of the snakes, thus keeping the reptiles occupied-more or less.

The spectators had remained comparatively silent and motionless up to this point, their curiosity, if anything, causing them to push farther and farther into the open area. Now, suddenly, in the fringe of onlookers about the courtyard there was a violent recoil. Some who had seated themselves comfortably on the hard, smooth clay sprang up, or instinctively drew back-all because one of the eight snake priests, in his trot past the snake-pit, had paused just long enough to snatch a good-sized rattlesnake and, seizing it in his teeth, continue on his way. Very wisely the Indian had located his dental hold on the reptile just back of the latter's head so that he was unable to turn and strike. But what the head lacked in movement the tail and the rest of the body made up for with lashing and writhing. Sometimes the dancer's neck was encircled, and sometimes one or the other of his upper arms. In the meantime the second one of this pair of priests passed his feathery scepter again and again across the face of the snake. Whether confusion or increased anger was the .result, it was difficult to tell.

In less time than it takes to tell it the dance was on in full force, each of the leaders in the four pairs of snake priests having snatched a writhing form from what one spectator called "the vestibule of hell" there under the bower of bushes. Each seized his prey in his mouth and continued on his way. In the meantime the wail of the chanters increased in volume. Women screamed or gasped horrified at the spectacle which, a few moments before, they had regarded as a bit of crude comedy. Even the men felt chills run up and down their spines, if their set, blanched faces may be taken as an indication.

But there was more excitement to come. For while the spectators looked on, fascinated, first one and then another and another of the priests hurled his snake to the ground in the center of the dance circle, and then:

No sooner did the creatures strike the ground than they started for the edge of the enclosure. Most of them were rattlers and blue racers, and it is no wonder that the onlookers were alarmed. But before any of the snakes could reach the ring of encircling visitors one or two additional participants in the dance, whom I will call "catchers," had leaped after the fleeing reptiles and, with a swing of his arm for all the world like that of a third baseman catching a grounder, had seized the snake in his hand.

Then, lest the creature might turn and strike him, the catcher began whirling the snake about his head as David is supposed to have swung his sling. The centrifugal force of this swift and skilful performance was so great that no captured snake was able to do any damage. Perhaps that was the reason the Indian was so unconcerned when the flying head or tail of a reptile came within an inch or two of some speetator's face.

It must be borne in mind that the steadily moving circle of dancers was constantly adding to the squirming, writhing mass of snakes on the ground in the center of the ring, and that these creatures lost no time in "getting on their way," which meant heading directly for some spectator's feet. At the same time the catchers were busy as cats on a tin roof leaping from one side of the enclosure to the other, stooping down as they ran and seizing the reptiles that had traveled farthest. As fast as they picked up the snakes they transferred them from the right hand to the left. Their method was to thrust the first snake between the index finger and the thumb of the left hand. The second snake was held between the first and second finger and so on until five or more were twisting and lashing in the hand of the extremely agile catcher.

Suddenly the dancers changed their step. and the next moment four men who had dexterously gathered up all the snakes, each holding about a fourth of the total, turned their backs on their associates and headed for the four points of the compass. In their hands were the twisting, writhing reptiles. The crowd instinctively parted at the four corners of the enclosure. Like the fleet runners that, these chosen men were, they started at top speed for the desert-one to the east, another to the west, another, to the south, another to the north. While the throng turned, breathless, and watched these messengers to the Great Spirit their dark forms grew smaller and smaller, until finally they became faint specks on the mesa.

ID

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