The center of the Glittering World was Diné Tah, which lay around Largo Canyon, about eighty miles southeast of the Four Corners monument. To the Navajo it was the sacred heartland of their country. The first time they left it en masse was in the 1860s, after Colonel Kit Carson and the U.S. Army reduced them to starvation by scorching the earth of their Glittering World. Carson felt no personal animosity toward the Navajo. He is said to have commented once, "I've seen as much of 'em as any white man livin', and I can't help but pity 'em. They'll all soon be gone anyhow." He was an unlettered man, given to expressing himself plainly. Unlike him, his commanding officer, General James H. Carleton, had had the benefits of an education. He was therefore able to phrase the matter more dispassionately, clothed in the mellow light of current trends in science and theology: "In their appointed time He wills that one race of men — as in races of lower animals — shall disappear off the face of the earth and give place to another race… The races of the Mammoths and Mastodons, and great Sloths, came and passed away: the Red Man of America is passing away."
The Navajo were forced to march to an "experimental" camp at the Bosque Redondo. It was soon clear, however, that the experiment was not going to work, and in 1868 a commission headed by General William T. Sherman was sent to New Mexico to decide what was to be done with the Navajo. Addressing the commission, the Navajo leader, Barboncito, said, "When the Navajo were first created, four mountains and four rivers were pointed out to us, inside of which we should live, that was to be our country and was given to us by the first woman of the Navajo tribe." Later he said to the general, "I am speaking to you now as if I was speaking to a spirit and I wish you to tell me when you are going to take us to our country." They were permitted to return later the same year. Of their return, Manuelito, the most renowned of the Navajo war chiefs, said afterward, "We felt like talking to the ground, we loved it so." They were back in Diné Bikeyah, where every butte and mesa pointed to the sacred center of Diné Tah.
The Four Corners monument evokes a center too, in its own way. But that central point, the point from which its line of longitude takes its westerly orientation, that central zero degree from which its distance can be so exactly calculated, lies in another landscape, on another continent — far away in Greenwich, England. It is that distant place that the monument unwittingly celebrates.
The monument itself is modest by the standards of monuments in the United States. There is a wide, paved plaza, with plenty of parking space for cars and RVs. On the peripheries there are rows of stalls, manned by people from the neighboring Ute and Navajo reservations.
In the center of the plaza is a square cement platform fenced off by aluminum railings. There is a state flag on each side of the square and, towering above them, a flag of the United States of America, on an eagle-topped mast. Two straight lines are etched into the cement; they intersect neatly at the center of the platform. Somebody has thoughtfully provided a small observation post at one end of the square. There would be little point, after all, in taking pictures of the Four Corners if you couldn't see the two lines intersect. And to get them properly into your frame, you have to be above ground level.
You have to queue, both for your turn at the observation post and to get into the center of the platform. If there are two of you, you have to queue twice at each end, unless you can get somebody to oblige you by taking your picture (and that is easy enough, for there are no friendlier people in the world than American tourists). But queuing is no great trial anyway, even in the desert heat, for everyone is good-humored, and it is not long before you find yourself engaged in comparing notes on campgrounds and motels with everyone around you.
There is a good-natured spirit of competition among the people who walk into the center of the cement platform: everyone tries to be just a little original when posing for their photographs. A young couple kiss, their lips above the center and each of their feet in a different state. Another couple pose, more modestly, with one foot on each state and their arms around each other's shoulders. Six middle-aged women distribute themselves between the states, holding hands. An elderly gentleman in Bermuda shorts lets himself slowly down onto his hands and knees and poses with an extremity on each state and his belly button at the center. This sets something of a trend; a couple of middle-aged women follow suit. In the end a pretty teenage girl carries the day by striking a balletic pose on one leg, her toes dead center on the point where the lines intersect.
Men from the reservations lounge about in the shade of the stalls, around the edges of the plaza. Some rev their cars, huge, lumbering old Chevrolets and Buicks, startling the tourists. A boy, bored, drives into the scrub, sending whirlwinds of sand shooting into the sky. Others sit behind their stalls, selling "Indian" jewelry and blankets and Navajo fry bread. When evening comes and the flow of tourists dwindles, they will pack the contents of their stalls into their cars and go home to their reservations. No one stays the night here; there is nothing to stay for — the attractions of the place are wholly unworldly.
They will be back early next morning: the cars and RVs start arriving soon after dawn, their occupants eager to absorb what they can of the magic of the spectacle of two straight lines intersecting.
THE IMAM AND THE INDIAN 1986
I MET THE IMAM of the village and Khamees the Rat at about the same time. I don't exactly remember now — it happened more than six years ago — but I think I met the imam first.
But this is not quite accurate. I didn't really "meet" the imam: I inflicted myself upon him. Perhaps that explains what happened.
Still, there was nothing else I could have done. As the man who led the daily prayers in the mosque, he was a leading figure in the village, and since I, a foreigner, had come to live there, he may well, for all I knew, have been offended had I neglected to pay him a call. Besides, I wanted to meet him; I was intrigued by what I'd heard about him.
People didn't often talk about the imam in the village, but when they did, they usually spoke of him somewhat dismissively, but also a little wistfully, as they might of some old, half-forgotten thing, like the annual flooding of the Nile. Listening to my friends speak of him, I had an inkling, long before I actually met him, that he already belonged, in a way, to the village's past. I thought I knew this for certain when I heard that apart from being an imam, he was also, by profession, a barber and a healer. People said he knew a great deal about herbs and poultices and the old kind of medicine. This interested me. This was Tradition: I knew that in rural Egypt, imams and other religious figures are often by custom associated with those two professions.
The trouble was that these accomplishments bought the imam very little credit in the village. The villagers didn't any longer want an imam who was also a barber and a healer. The older people wanted someone who had studied at Al-Azhar and could quote from Jamal ad-Din Afghani and Mohammad Abduh as fluently as he could from the Hadith, and the younger men wanted a fierce, black-bearded orator, someone whose voice would thunder from the mimbar and reveal to them their destiny. No one had time for old-fashioned imams who made themselves ridiculous by boiling herbs and cutting hair.
Yet Ustad Ahmed, who taught in the village's secondary school and was as well read a man as I have ever met, often said — and this was not something he said of many people — that the old imam read a lot. A lot of what? Politics, theology, even popular science… that kind of thing.