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people have talked, and if you care to, I shall permit you to sit down with us and listen.

   Let us say that it is dusk in that strange place which you, the white-man, calls "Death Valley." I have passed tobacco (with us a sacred plant) to the aged chief of the Paiute’s who sits across a tiny fire from me and sprinkles corn meal upon the flames. You sprinkle holy water, while we sprinkle corn meal and blow the smoke of the tobacco to the four directions in order to dispel bad luck and ask a blessing.

   The old chief looked like a wrinkled mummy as he sat there puffing upon his pipe. Yet his eyes were not those of the unseeing, but eyes which seemed to look back on long trails of time. His people had held the Inyo, Panamint and Death Valleys for untold centuries before the coming of the white-man. Now we sat in the valley which white-man named for Death, but which the Paiute calls Tomesha -- The Flaming-Land.

   Here before me as I faced eastward, the Funerals (mountains forming Death Valley's eastern wall) were wrapped in purple-blue blankets about their feet while their faces were painted in scarlet. Behind me, the Panamints rose like a mile-high wall, dark against the sinking sun.

   The old Paiute smoked my tobacco for a long time before he reverently blew the smoke to the four directions. Finally he spoke.

   "You ask me if we heard of the great silver airships in the days before white-man brought his wagon trains into the land?"

   "Yes grandfather, I come seeking knowledge." (Among all tribe's of my people, grandfather is the term of greatest respect which one man can pay to another.)

   "We the Paiute Nation, have known of these ships