The painting in front of which the old man sat, and at which he gazed from time to time, represented in the first place a green disk surrounded by short red rays, which three white squares, bordered with black, converted into something like the rude semblance of a human face.  This disk stood for a picture of the sun.  Below it was the symbol of the moon’s white disk, encircled by a black and red ring, and provided also with square eyes and mouth.  Still lower were painted two crosses, a red one and a white one, both with black border.

Above the sun there appeared a form intended to be human, painted in very gaudy colours.  This was P[=a]yatyama, the sun-father.  On each side of him rose a terraced pyramid painted green, and from the top of one of these pyramids to that of the other there spanned or stretched a tri-coloured arch, red, yellow, and blue, over the sun-father’s head.  On each side of sun and moon was the crudely executed picture of an animal,—­the one on the right, being intended for a bear, painted green; the one on the left, for a panther, painted red.  The heads of these beasts were turned toward the central figures.  Still farther, beyond these beasts of prey, two gigantic green serpents with horned heads swept over the remainder of the wall, leaving but a narrow space facing the sun, where four maize-plants, two green ones and two of a reddish-brown hue, were painted.

Below the central figures and not quite reaching up to them, an arch of wood, painted green with a yellow middle stripe, was held aloft by two poles driven into the floor of the estufa.  Under this arch stood a wooden screen, green and black with a yellow border at the bottom, while the upper edge was carved into four terraced pyramids surmounted by as many black arches.  Both right and left of the screen, pine-branches resembling Christmas-trees of to-day were stuck into the floor.  This strange decoration expresses symbolically a meaning similar to that intended to be conveyed by the dance of the ayash tyucotz.

The sun-father, soaring above the sun, moon, and stars,—­for the red cross is the star of morning, the white the evening star,—­is surrounded by the symbols of the principal phenomena in nature that are regarded as essentially beneficent to mankind.  Thus the terraced pyramids are the clouds, for the clouds appear to the Indian as staircases leading to heaven, and they in turn support the rainbow.  The two principal beasts of prey, who feed upon game, like man, and whose strength, agility, and acute senses man hopes to acquire, are represented as the bear in the colour symbolic of the east, and the panther in that of the south.  Farther away from the sun-father are the two monstrous water-snakes, genii of the fish-bearing and crop-irrigating water-courses.  The sun-father stands surrounded by all these elements and beings; he fixes his blissful magic gaze upon the nourishing maize-plants, that they may grow and that their ripe fruit may sustain the tribe.  Thus much for the allegory on the wall.