Quivira

I Also reputed to be golden, Quivira: Cibola, unknown to Coronado, meant ‘buffalo’ to the Indians, but onward, to El Dorado, ‘The Gilded One’, a country where boats were incrusted with gold, where golden bells hung from trees (tho the food there, said to be served on gold, was buffalo). ‘We took the hump from both sides of the hump ribs, of all the carcasses.  In taking out the hump we inserted the knife at the coupling of the loin, cutting forward down the lower side, as far forward as the perpendicular ribs ran; then, starting at the loin again, would cut down the upper side, thus taking out a strip from a full-grown animal about three feet long.  Near the front of the hump ribs it would be ten or twelve inches wide & four or five inches thick.  When first taken out it was hung up for a couple of days with the big end down.  It became shrunken, tender & brittle, with no taint.  The front end had a streak of lean alternating with fat & when fried in tallow, made a feast for the gods’. The prairie soil was ‘black & fat’ &, according to Castaneda, the marrow of the land. On that soil, later to be stripped for prairie sod-houses, wild turkeys flocked among the persimmons their flesh succulent from golden sand plums, bitter with china-berries. The coyotes, their eyes aglow on the dark horizon, barked at a moon above the lowing of buffalo, heard twenty miles away. And cottonwood trees, from whose buds the Indians made clear yellow, scattered their drift in spring filling the gullies. The Quivirans were to tell Coranado ‘the things where you are now are of great importance’. II As Coronado turned to retrace his steps, the Smoky Hills were visible north across a stream enveloped in an atmospheric haze in which the hills became distant, impossible mountains— ‘where you are now’ the Indians had said, ‘of great importance’. The country they traveled over was so level, if one looked at the buffalo the sky could be seen between their legs, so that at a distance they appeared to be smooth-trunked pines whose tops jointed— & if there was one bull, it seemed four pines. The country was round, as if a man should imagine himself in a bowl, & could see sky at its edge an arrow’s shot away. And if any man were to lie down on his back, he lost sight of the ground. Did Coronado see also in that late summer storm, before he turned south, an horizon of dark funnels tapering toward the earth, coming with the thunderous sound of a buffalo herd out of the plains—a calm & sulphurous air in which clouds were drawn like lightning toward the funnels— scattering his men to hide among grassy hollows? A tornado against the sky like buffalo who were beared as goats, with the hump of a camel, the mane of a lion & who carried their tails erect as they ran, like any European scorpion. O Coronado, all country is round to those who lose sight of the ground. Canceas, Cansez, Kansies, Konza: the Indian word meaning smoky, from an atmospheric condition in the fall of the year, called Indian Summer: smoke in the air, in Quivira.