Chapter 52
Like a Thief in the Night (cont)

Walking in the last days

Hopi Indian Reservation, May 1994: Across the high plains of Arizona, for days and days and days, a desolate wind had been blowing. As we drove across those plains towards the tiny village of Shungopovi, I went over in my mind all I had seen and done in the previous five years: my travels, my research, the false starts and dead-ends I had encountered, the lucky breaks, the moments when everything had come together, the moments when everything seemed about to fall apart.

I had traveled a long road to get here, I realized - far longer than the 300-mile freeway that had whisked us up into these austere badlands from Phoenix, the state capital. Nor did I expect to return with any great degree of enlightenment.

Nevertheless, I had made this journey because the science of prophecy is still believed to be alive among the Hopi: Pueblo Indians, distantly related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been reduced by attrition and misery to barely 10,000. Like the Ancient Maya whose descendants all across the Yucatan are convinced that the end of the world is coming in the year 2000 y pico (and a little), the Hopi believe that we are walking in the last days, with a geo1ogica1 sword of Damocles hanging over us. According to their myths, as we saw in Chapter Twenty-four:

The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming fire that came from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled from its axis and everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal flood. The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave in accordance with the Creator's plans ... '

I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought we were behaving in accordance with the Creator's plans ...