Then, if they have your speech or you theirs, and have an hour to spare, there are things to be learned of life not set down in any books, folk tales, famine tales, love and long-suffering and desire, but no whimpering.  Now and then one or another of the blind keepers of the camp will come across to where you sit gossiping, tapping her way among the kitchen middens, guided by your voice that carries far in the clearness and stillness of mesa afternoons.  But suppose you find Seyavi retired into the privacy of her blanket, you will get nothing for that day.  There is no other privacy possible in a campoodie.  All the processes of life are carried on out of doors or behind the thin, twig-woven walls of the wickiup, and laughter is the only corrective for behavior.  Very early the Indian learns to possess his countenance in impassivity, to cover his head with his blanket.  Something to wrap around him is as necessary to the Paiute as to you your closet to pray in.

So in her blanket Seyavi, sometime basket maker, sits by the unlit hearths of her tribe and digests her life, nourishing her spirit against the time of the spirit’s need, for she knows in fact quite as much of these matters as you who have a larger hope, though she has none but the certainty that having borne herself courageously to this end she will not be reborn a coyote.

THE STREETS OF THE MOUNTAINS

All streets of the mountains lead to the citadel; steep or slow they go up to the core of the hills.  Any trail that goes otherwhere must dip and cross, sidle and take chances.  Rifts of the hills open into each other, and the high meadows are often wide enough to be called valleys by courtesy; but one keeps this distinction in mind,—­valleys are the sunken places of the earth, canons are scored out by the glacier ploughs of God.  They have a better name in the Rockies for these hill-fenced open glades of pleasantness; they call them parks.  Here and there in the hill country one comes upon blind gullies fronted by high stony barriers.  These head also for the heart of the mountains; their distinction is that they never get anywhere.

All mountain streets have streams to thread them, or deep grooves where a stream might run.  You would do well to avoid that range uncomforted by singing floods.  You will find it forsaken of most things but beauty and madness and death and God.  Many such lie east and north away from the mid Sierras, and quicken the imagination with the sense of purposes not revealed, but the ordinary traveler brings nothing away from them but an intolerable thirst.