[Illustration:  Figure 6.—­Flute Boy before Costuming.

—­Courtesy Arizona State Museum.]

On the ninth day women were observed sweeping the trail to the spring with meticulous care, in preparation for the double procession which came down at about 1:30 in the afternoon.

All the costuming was done at the spring—­body painting, putting on of ceremonial garments and arranging of hair.

The fathers of the Flute maidens brushed and arranged their hair for them and put on their blankets.  If a girl had no father, her uncle did this for her.  There were two Flute Maids and a Flute Boy (See Figure 6) who walked between them, in each of the two fraternities.  Even this ceremonial costuming was accompanied by solemn singing.

When all was ready the priests sat on the edge of the pool with their legs hanging over, and the two maids and the boy sat behind them on a terrace of the bank.  The Blue Flute fraternity occupied one side of the pool and the Drab Flute fraternity another.  Many songs were sung to the strange, plaintive accompaniment of the flute players.  After a while an old priest waded into the pool and walked around it in ever-narrowing circles till he reached the center, where he sank into the water and disappeared for a dramatically long moment and came up with a number of ceremonial objects in his hands, including a gourd bottle filled with water from the depths of the spring.

It was late afternoon by the time all the songs had been sung, and evening when the two processions had finished their ceremonial ascent to the mesa top, pausing again and again as the old priest went ahead and drew his symbolic barrier of meal and the three rain clouds across the path, which were to be covered with the pahos of the Flute children, then taken up and moved on to the next like symbol.  The old priest led the procession, the three children behind him, then the flute players, followed by the priests bearing emblems, and the priest with the bull roarer at the end of the line.  Each fraternity preserved its own formation.  Having reached the village plaza they marched to the Kisa and deposited their pahos and ceremonial offerings, then dispersed.  The solemnity of the long ritual, the weird chant and the plaintive accompaniment of the flutes running through the whole ceremony, while at the spring, coming up the hill, and to the last act before the Kisa, leaves the imprint of its strange musical vibration long after the scene has closed.

The legend back of this ceremony is a long account of the migrations of the Horn and Flute people.  It relates that when they at last reached Walpi, they halted at a spring and sent a scout ahead to see if people were living there.  He returned and reported that he had seen traces of other people.  So the Flute people went forth to find them.  When they came in sight of the houses of Walpi, they halted at the foot of the mesa, then began moving up the trail in ceremonial procession, with songs and the music of the flutes.