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WE HAD EATEN lunch -- discreetly out of sight behind our car -- and had just stepped back under the brush arbor when we saw something that none of us had ever seen before. Two men, suspended by ropes pinned to the flesh above their shoulder blades, were hanging six feet over the ground. Dark blood trickled down their backs; their long, glossy hair gleamed like a raven's wing. Each man held two eagle feather, which he flapped urgently.

A hot August sun boiled overhead. Under the shade of the arbor other men, clad in T-shirts and baseball caps, beat drums and wailed in high-pitched voices. A throbbing sound mixed with ululating cries floated out over the tall cottonwood in the center of the circle. From the topmost branches dangled taut ropes with their grisly human cargo. A stiff breeze whirled across the arbor, kicking up little curlicues of dust.

The contents of the cheese sandwich I had just devoured rumbled ominously in my stomach. All morning we had watched other types of piercing, mainly of young men and boys. With bone pegs protruding from their chests, they had pulled back with all their strength against ropes tied to the sacred tree until the pegs popped free in an explosion of blood and tissue.

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That was absorbing enough. But two men hanging limply from the branches was a sight that we could not comprehend -- that in our conventional white background there simply was no precedent for. All we could do was acknowledge what was happening. We were confronted with a spectacle that plumbed the very heart of aboriginal America.

An ancient ritual known as the Sun Dance is performed every summer out on the Great Plains at the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Crow reservations. It is one of the most extraordinary Native American rituals, rivaling anything else on the continent in power and mysticism, including the Hopi Snake Dance and the Yaqui Deer Dance. The one we witnessed took place on the Pine Ridge Reservation of South Dakota, home of the Oglala Sioux.

The Oglala have an interesting history. The largest branch of the Teton or Western Sioux, anthropologists trace their ancestry all the way back to Tennessee and North Carolina. Warfare and food shortages in the 16th century forced them to embark upon a long migration through the Ohio River Valley to Minnesota where, in the late 17th century, they first encountered French traders and trappers.

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Driven from there by the Chippewa, they ventured out onto the northern plains, reaching the Black Hills around 1775. During the long struggle against European encroachment into their hunting grounds, they were led by such legendary figures as Red Cloud and Crazy Horse. In battles along the Bozeman Trail (1866-1868) and at the Rosebud and Little Big Horn Rivers (1876), they either defeated federal troops or fought them to a standstill. In December 1890, they fought the last major engagement between Indians and U.S. Army troops on this continent at a place called Wounded Knee.

The 1880s were a grim time for the Oglala. With the buffalo ruthlessly decimated by white hunters, they were forced to live on reservations where rations could be doled out to them and where their nomadic life could be restricted.

The Sun Dance was outlawed in 1884, and for good reason. Anyone willing to subject themselves to such an ordeal would most likely find campaigning against the U.S. Cavalry an invigorating sport. And so, like many practices censored by the federal government, the Sun Dance went underground and for nearly half a century was performed away from disapproving eyes in remote pockets of the Pine Ridge Reservation.

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In 1934, as a result of the Indian Reorganization Act which established the legality (in white parlance) of many religious activities, the Sun Dance resurfaced, albeit in a bowdlerized version that did not include piercing. In the 1960s however -- with the advent of the Red Power movement and the corresponding heightening of Indian consciousness -- piercing recommenced in earnest.

It is an unsettling spectacle for a wasichu -- white person -- to witness. Our Judeo- Christian tradition sanctions martyrdom, but only when it holds out the promise of transfiguration. Christ suffered fearsome torments on the cross, but he was finally relieved of his agony by death and the ascension of his spirit into heaven. But to suffer physical agony for life -- so that one's people may benefit -- is not as comprehensible. And yet that is why, today as in the past, young Oglala men -- and old -- subject themselves to the rigors of piercing.

Participation in the ritual is voluntary. Not every man feels compelled to do it; certainly not everyone wants to. A sign or signal in the form of a dream or vision usually indicates a person's willingness. Others -- usually older -- participate to give thanks for having survived a crisis. The intensity of suffering forms a deep bond, not only between the dancers but with the oldest and most sacred tribal traditions. Personal motives aside, the ultimate point of the ordeal is to bring one into contact with Wakan Tanka, the embodiment of spiritual power in the Sioux cosmology.

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The circle formed by the brush arbor, of which the tree is the center, is a holy and mysterious place. Many astounding things happen within it during the four-day ceremony. Frank Fools Crow, a venerable Oglala shaman, has said, "Sometimes we see eagles flying among the branches, or even an airplane in there. Everyone sees these things, and we see different things each day."

The ordeal is vitally important to Oglala traditionalists. Above all, it is theirs, undiluted by white or Christian influences. It is the most compelling antidote they can offer to the negative impact that wasichu culture has had on their own; it offers a viable alternative to alcoholism, immorality, and spiritual lassitude. The ordeal is inimitably Indian, intensely physical and sublimely visionary, a commitment of body and soul to the preservation of the profoundest ideals of the people.

This sort of offering has no equivalent in our culture. It can't be satisfied by signing a fat check or turning over old clothes to a welfare agency or doing volunteer work in a soup kitchen -- the offering can be made only in blood suffering. "The Indian religion is a hard one," an old man told me later. "It has to be. We have faced the threat of extinction for so long that in order to survive we must be as hard as the granite core of our beloved Black Hills."

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Flesh and blood, then -- palpable human stuff that spills and oozes and hurts. The sort of thing that the two Lawrences, D.H. and T.E. -- one from the perspective of a voyeur, the other as a participant -- rhapsodized in their prose. During a Sun Dance, friends and family often will have little pieces of flesh gouged out of their arms. The offerings are then deposited on a buffalo skull to dry in the sun -- an offering to Wakan Tanka to help the dancer endure the misery of hanging by a rope attached to his body by sharp skewers jabbed through the skin. Blood for blood . . . your blood for mine . . . our blood for the people.

As we watched, one of the young men suspended from the rope passed out, and like a bag of grain attached to a pulley, twisted slowly in the breeze. A shaman elbowed him in the ribs, whereupon the young man began to beat, feebly at first and then with growing ardor, the eagle feathers clutched in each hand. The weight of his body pulled the bone pegs away from his shoulder blades in wads of frightfully puckered flesh. Over the dusty, trampled ground he drifted like a curious bird, bound not by any coil to the earth but rather by an implacable tether to the sky.

The chanting and drumbeats uptempoed from under the brush arbor. Beating his arms wildly, he tried to break free but couldn't. Finally, in a stupendous act of courage, he pulled himself up higher on the rope, and letting go, spread out his legs and arms like a skydiver. The shock ripped the pegs out of his back with a sound like ripe pears striking a concrete floor.

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Two shamans rushed forward, one to rub an herbal compound into the deep puncture wounds in his back. A few minutes later, the man was up and dancing around the brush corral, his face shining with a mixture of agony and exaltation.

We were witnessing the climax of a complicated four-day ceremony, and for the participants the culmination of a long period of instruction and fasting that ends in an apotheosis of blood and pain. Most men subject themselves to the ordeal only once. The wounds inflicted by the skewers are by no means crippling, though they do leave indelible scars.

The scars are a special talisman of bravery and fortitude which does not go unnoticed in the Oglala community. Traditionally, young men did it to test their courage and endurance for the trials of warfare at which they hoped to make their mark; today, there are other inducements.

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One man in his 60s, who had recently recovered from cancer, had his back pierced in two places just below the shoulder blades. Accompanied by the frantic pounding of drums, he dragged an unwieldy bobble of eight buffalo skulls several times around the brush circle until the weight of the skulls finally tore the pegs out of his back. A woman whispered to me that he was undergoing the ordeal to give thanks to the Great Spirit for curing him of the white man's disease.

Before the dance each participant undergoes lengthy religious instruction. Piercing does not usually commence until the third or fourth day; the first two days are spent in fasting and prayer, with the participants facing into the sun and mouthing incantations. Friends and relatives come and go; Indians or family members who wish to show their support can remove their shoes and join the dancers in the circle. These dancers are vividly clad in tribal costume and form a kind of supporting chorus to the men undergoing piercing. For hours in the grueling sun they shuffle back and forth to the din of drums, tooting shrilly on eagle-bone whistles.

One ceremony we witnessed that morning involved a boy of about 12. Two circles painted over his nipples indicated that he was to perform. A skirt, beaded around the hem, covered his legs; his wrists and head were banded with wreaths of silver sage.

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Two shamans placed him on his back at the foot of the cottonwood. One bit the flesh on his chest and quickly inserted the skewers. Then the boy stood up and backpeddled away from the tree until the rope went taut. The weight of his body caused the flesh over his nipples to bulge alarmingly; then he dashed forward and placed both hands against the cottonwood. Again and again he repeated this action, each time hurling himself harder against the stiff rope, trying to wrench the pegs out of his chest.

Finally, a shaman escorted him back to the tree where they prayed together. Then, hooking him around the waist with one arm, the shaman (facing the opposite direction) ran with the boy and, as the rope grew tight, pulled with all his might. The pegs blew out of the boy's chest with an audible pop, triggering a spray of fresh blood. Relieved of his burden, his eyes gaping, the boy staggered back into the arms of his family, who swarmed over him with affection and concern.

A few minutes later, other shamans paraded the boy around the brush corral. There was no cheering or applause, only silence, though most of the spectators stood up. A sort of victory lap like at the Olympics, with no cameras to record the event, and only God and the people as witnesses. The shamans stutter-stepped grimly at his side. The boy's round face was stained with tears. After completing the lap, he rejoined his family.

To the cloistered eye, the land seems boundless, devoid of meaningful features. It isn't flat -- there are other parts of the Great Plains, notably the Llano Estacado of Texas, that are much flatter; rather, it's like a succession of broken slabs, cracked and tilted by erosion into a variety of surface planes. At intervals, these slabs warp up into tree-covered buttes and tables, with truncated tops like platforms. Myriad creeks snake down through the draws and gullies. Though bone-dry in summer, they conceal a water table that nourishes dense stands of elm and ash and cottonwood, along with plum and chokecherry thickets.

On hot afternoons, cottonwood leaves make soft fluttery sounds that delicately overlap one another and meld into a thick lathery hum. In the morning, cumulus clouds stack up over the Black Hills, 50 miles to the west; by midafternoon, propelled by westerly winds, they douse the parched grass of the Pine Ridge Reservation with intense rainsqualls. Lightning forks down from the thunderheads, striking the slopes and occasionally igniting fires.

Scorching in summer, ravaged by cruel Arctic winds in winter, it is a land of extremes, with temperate periods of short duration in between. Though the anthropologists say the Oglala arrived here in the 18th century, the Oglala think they've been here a lot longer -- almost as long as the buffalo, which first emerged from a hole in the Black Hills. In the centuries since, against both Indian and white enemies, the Oglala have fought for this land.

The soaring arch of the sky pulls the gaze up naturally to the clouds. The emptiness cries out for a vision to personify it, a sign or portent that man, insignificant in comparison to allthis space, has a purpose and function. And so for generations Oglala warriors have fasted on top of flat-topped buttes or hung from ropes in an effort to focus the vagaries of their uncertain existence into the radiance of a visionary experience that will unite earth with sky, themselves with Wakan Tanka. At the pitch of their suffering, with the metaphoric grace of poets, they fuse the elements of their harsh lives into luminous wholes. This is powerful country, ageless and unspoiled, redolent with magic, strong as a buffalo heart.

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