ERN MEXICO, forty-eigh

t hours from Mexico City, there is a race
of pu re red Indians called the Tarahumara. Forty thousand people
are living there

in a style that predates the Flood. They are a challenge to this world in which people talk so much about progress only because they despair of progressing. This race, which ought to be physically degenerate, has for four hundred years resisted every force that has

come to attack it: civilization, interbreeding, war, winter, animals, storms, and the forest. The Tarahumara live naked in the winter in mountains that are made impassable by snow, in defiance of all medical theories. Communism exists among them in a feeling of spontaneous solidarity. Incredible as it may seem, the Tarahumara Indians live if they were already dead. They do not see reality and they draw magical powers from the contempt they have for civilization. Sometimes they come to the cities, impelled by I know not what desire to

move, to see, as they say, how it is with those who are mistaken. For t

• hem, to live in the city is to be mistaken. They come with wives and
  children, making impossible journeys which no animal would try to attempt. To watch them unswervingly follow their course, through torrents, ground that gives way, dense
• Finnigan Liquid Chromatograph-Mass spectrometer (LC-MS):
  The LC-MS separates and detects the content of liquid samples such as solutions of TNT, RDX, enzymes, and other molecules.
• undergrowth, rock ladders, sheer walls. I cannot help th
  inking that they have somehow retained the instinctive force of gravitation of the first men. On first encounter, the region of the Tarahumara appears inaccessible. At best, a few poorly marked trails that every twenty yards seem to disappear under the ground. When night falls one must stop, unle
• ss one is a red man, for only a red man
  can see where to put his feet. When the Tarahumara come down into the cities, they beg. In a striking manner: they stop by the doors of houses and turn their heads to the side with an air of sovereign contempt. They seem to be saying: "Since you are rich, you are a dog, I am bette
• r than you, I spit on y
  The IC gives information on the ions contained in a sample. Both positive ions (cations) and negative ions (anions) are detected. Applications for this technique include the identification of energetic materials from the residues they leave behind, separation and identification of metal ions from solutions of mixed ions, and identification of ion concentrations.
• ou." Whether they are given anything or not, they always leave after the same pe
  riod of time. If they are given something, they do not say thank you. For in their eyes to give to someone who has nothing is not even a duty; it is a law of physical reciprocity which the White World has betrayed. Their attitude seems to say: "In obeying the law, it is yourself you are helping, so I do not have to thank you." The money obtained by begging is used to buy food for the return trip, for in the Tarahumara forest it
• is hard to see what might be
  the use of money. This law of physical reciprocity which we call charity the Indians observe naturally, and without a trace of pity. Those who have nothing because they lost their harvest, because their corn has burned, because their father left them nothing, or for whateve
• r reason which they have no need t
  o explain, arrive at dawn at the houses of those who have something. Immediately the mistress of the house brings them whatever she has. No one looks at anyone, neither the one who gives nor the one who re
• ceives. After he has eaten, the beggar leaves without thanking or looking at anyone. The whole life of the Tarahumara revolves around the erotic Peyote rite. The root of the Peyote plant is hermaphroditic.

It has, as we know, the sh

• ape of the male and female sexual organs combined. It is in this rite that
• the whole secret of these savage Indians resides. To me, its force
• seemed to be symbolized by the rasp
• ing stick, a piece
• of curved wood c
• overed with notches which, for whole nights,
• the Peyote sorcerers rhythmically scrape with little sticks. But the strangest part is the way in which

these sorcerers are recruited. One day, an Indian will feel called to handle the rasp. He goes to a sacred hiding place in the mountains, where for thousands of years there has lain an incredible collection of rasps which other sorcerers have buried. They are made of wood, the wood of warm soil, it is said. The Tarahumara will spend three years living on this plantation of rasps and, at the end of the third year, he returns—the possessor of the es

sential rite. Such is the life of this strange people over whom no civilization will ever gain control. To visit the Tarahumara is to enter a world which is incredibly anachronistic and exists in defiance of this age. As far as I am concerne