[Illustration: THE "BURRO" OF HOPI TRANSPORTATION.]
Here, too, in the harvesting time one may witness busy and interesting scenes. Whole families move down into temporary brush homes, and women and children aid the men in gathering the crops. Tethered and hobbled burros stand patiently awaiting their share of the common labor.
Yonder is a group of men busy digging a deep pit. Watch them as it nears completion. It is made with a narrow neck and "bellies" out to considerable width below. Indeed, it is shaped not unlike an immense vase with a large, almost spherical body and narrow neck. In depth it is perhaps six, eight, ten, or a dozen feet. On one side a narrow stairway is cut into the earth leading down to its base, and at the foot of this stairway a small hole is cut through into the chamber. Our curiosity is aroused. What is this subterranean place for? As we watch, the workers bring loads of greasewood and other inflammable material, kindle a fire in the chamber, and fill it up with the wood. Now we see the use of the small hole at the foot of the stairway. It acts as a draught hole, and soon a raging furnace fire is in the vault before us. When a sufficient heat has been obtained, the bottom hole is closed, and then scores of loads of corn on the cob are dropped into the heated chamber. When full, every avenue that could allow air to enter is sealed, and there the corn remains over night or as long as is required to cook it,--self-steam it. It is then removed, packed in sacks or blankets on the backs of the patient burros, and removed to the corn-rooms of the houses on the mesa above.
Other fresh corn is carried up and spread out on the house-tops to dry.
All this is stored away in the corn-rooms, into which strangers sometimes are invited, but oftener kept away from. It is stacked up in piles like cord-wood, and happy is that household whose corn-stack is large at the beginning of a hard winter.
Walpi--the place of the gap--though not a large town, is better known to whites than any of the other Hopi towns. Here it was that the earliest visitors came and saw the thrilling Snake Dance. Its southeastern trail, with the wonderful detached rock leaning over on one side and the cliff on the other, between which the steep and rude stairway is constructed, has been so often pictured, as well as the so-called "Sacred Rock" of the Walpi dance plaza, that they are now as familiar as photographs of Trinity Church, New York, or St. Paul's, London. As one stands on the top of one of the houses he sees how closely Walpi has been built. It covers the whole of the south end of the mesa, up to the very edges of the precipice walls in three of its four directions, and, as already shown, the fourth is the narrow neck of rock connecting Walpi with Sichumavi and Hano. The dance plaza is to the east, a long, narrow place, at the south end of which is the "Sacred Rock." It is approached from south and north by the regular "street" or trail, and one may leave it to the west through an archway, over which is built one of the houses.