The Superstitions

The performance begins — the sun leads, the shadows follow and the rocks bring the two together in a ballet.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGE 24, BELOW] Layers of volcanic tuff, weathered and worried through countless seasons, provide the basis for the Superstition Mountains' fantasyland of rock formations.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 24 AND 25, ABOVE] The remains of violent volcanic upthrusts that occurred more than 15 million years ago form the strangely shaped spires and hoodoos of the west face of the Superstitions.

[LEFT] The arduous hike to the range's highest point, Superstition Peak, yields seldom-seen views of the rugged topography.

[ABOVE] Sunset colors of dusty orange and pink light the sky as night closes on a peak's summit.

Dance of Rocks

Through careful protection, this wilderness-nextdoor remains truly wild in the face of the encroaching suburbs.

[PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 28 AND 29] Relatively benign as it winds through Siphon Draw, the trail becomes difficult, and at times dangerous, climbing the final 2,000 vertical feet to the top of Superstition Peak.

[ABOVE] A glittering carpet of lights stretches to the horizon in this view from the top at dusk.

[LEFT] This aerial view of the western face of the Superstitions shows the eroded lava dome that gives the range a distinctive appearance.

Framed by the Superstitions' weird spires and hoodoos, Phoenix's Camelback Mountain seems to float above the valley's haze.

Dance of Rocks

THE LADY IN BLUE

During the early 1600s, a nun mysteriously appeared to Southwestern Indians without leaving her convent in Spain NO PROOF CAN Soothe the MIND of the skeptic, and NO Doubt can Penetrate the Heart of the faithful, what are we to make of the story of the Lady In Blue?

It's safe to say that the riddle of her apparitionlike appearances before Indians of the Southwest, and the mystery of her missionary work among them, will remain unsolved. This 380-year-old tale can't be worked out on paper or entered into a computer and put to the test of logic. But this story of the spirit, one of the Southwest's most deeply held episodes of faith, remains unique in that it doesn't exist in oral tradition alone. It's backed by the written memoirs of a respected 17th-century priest who traveled to a Spanish convent and conducted a two-week-long interview with the nun he firmly believed was the Lady in Blue.

Accounts of her visits with the Indians, which took place between 1620 and 1631, vary somewhat from tribe to tribe, but in the main, the following story emerges.

A beautiful, white-skinned young lady, dressed in blue and shrouded in a long veil, appeared among the Indians to teach the word of Christ, and leave behind rosaries, chalices and crosses.

Mystery always surrounded her appearances. No one knew how she came to each of the places she visited, or how she left. She seemed to be there one day, and gone the next, existing as much in spirit as in body.

But because of the miracles she worked, the Lady in Blue came to be held in mystical regard among Indians from west Texas to the pueblos of New Mexico and the mesas of Arizona. She continues to be part of the folklore of numerous Southwestern tribes.

Could it be true? Could a beautiful, spiritlike woman have walked among the Apaches, Zunis, Pimas and others, teaching Christianity?

Nonbelievers scoff at the legend. A pretty but flimsy tale, they say. Yet no doubter has ever successfully explained how so many tribes with different languages, and homelands separated by impassable distances, could relate essentially the same facts.

Her story earned the support of missionaries who worked in the Southwest about that time, some of whom interviewed eyewitnesses to her beneficence. Others, believing they'd arrived first to spread the message in the pagan deserts, found the Lady in Blue had beat them to it.

One recorded incident occurred in 1689, near Matagorda Bay, Texas. While working among the Tejas Indians, missionary Don Damien Manzanet was asked by a village chief for a piece of blue baize to make a shroud in which to bury his mother.

Manzanet suggested a black cloth instead, but the chief insisted on blue.

"I then asked him what mysterious reason he had for preferring the blue color," wrote Manzanet in his description of the encounter. "And in reply he said that they were very fond of that color, particularly for burial clothes, because in times past they had been visited by a very beautiful woman who used to come down from the hills, dressed in blue garments, and that they wished to do as that woman had done."

Her visits were long ago, the chief said. "But his mother, who was aged, had seen that woman, as had also the other old people," Manzanet wrote.

About the same time, Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino and his traveling companion Father Juan Mateo Manje heard of the legend in Arizona, where Indians told of a beautiful white woman, dressed in white, gray and blue, who spoke to them and shouted and chided in an unknown language.

"She carried a cross," Manje wrote in his diary. "They said the nations of the Colorado River had shot her twice, leaving her for dead, and that returning to life she would fly away without their knowing where her home was. After a few days she would return and chide them again."

Other Indians told the same story a few days later. Manje's account remains the only one in which the Lady in Blue spoke to the Indians in a language other than their own, and he speculated that explained their hostility.

A story that predates Kino comes from Franciscan Friar Juan de Salas. In 1629 he traveled in New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande Valley, unaware of the talk of a mysterious preaching woman spreading through Mexico and Spain. That changed when friars sent from Spain brought word of the Lady in Blue and her works.

Only a few days after de Salas received that news, Indians of the Jumanas tribe approached him at the Pueblo of Isleta. They came, as they had every summer, pleading for a priest to come baptize them. Asked the reason for their persistence, the