Lummis 'was assured of death in various unattractive forms,' if he attempted to photograph the Penitentes 

As Lummis told it in one of his half dozen or so published accounts of his scoop, "As the midnight wind sweeps down the lonely canon, the wild shriek can be heard for miles. It carries an indescribable and uncanny terror with it. That weird sound seems the wail of a tortured soul. I have known men of approved bravery to flee from that noise when they heard it for the first time. The oldest inhabitant crosses himself and looks askance when that sound floats out to him from the mountain gorges." But not Lummis.

"I had been watching feverishly for Holy Week to come," he continued. "No photographer had ever caught the Penitentes with his sun-lasso, and I was assured of death in various unattractive forms at the first hint of an attempt. But when the ululation of the pito filled the ear at night, enthusiasm crowded prudence to wall."

The next day, the entire village was on hand for the climactic rite. In the procession this time only one hooded man carried a cross, the one of the five cross-bearers from the day before who had the honor of being chosen for crucifixion. Several other men followed behind him, beating themselves with scourges, while another brought up the rear with a bundle of buckthorn cactus bound tightly to his back with the vicious inch-long needles, tough enough to penetrate shoe leather, piercing his back in hundreds of places. Lummis fell in behind with his camera. When the procession reached the crucifixion spot, Lummis’s diplomacy the evening before began to pay off. Many in the crowd still glowered at him. But the Hermanos Mayor was moved to return Lummis’s hospitality from the previous evening. He walked 100 paces away from the hole in the ground where the cross would be planted, drew a line in the dirt with his shoe and said Lummis could stand behind it to photograph the event.

The man who had been chosen for crucifixion had a four-inch gash in his side. When he reached the spot chosen for the ritual on a hillside in one of the canyons back of town, several of the Penitentes lifted the cross from his shoulder and laid it on the ground. He lay back on it and his attendants cinched him to it with rough ropes around his legs and arms pulled as tightly as the bindings on a mule. As they tightened the ropes, the man on the cross "sobbed like a child," Lummis reported, not because of the pain but because he was ashamed that they were not using nails instead. "Hay! Que estoy deshonrado! Not with a rope! Not with rope! Nail me! Nail me!" he cried. Up until that year, the victims had been spiked to the cross. But that grisly practice was in decline as a result of the bad publicity from the rising death toll. The year before, four men had perished while nailed to crosses in Penitente communities in southern Colorado, Lummis claimed.

The ropes were brutal enough. As Lummis watched and the minutes passed, the victim’s arms swelled and turned purple and he groaned with pain. Meanwhile the Penitente with the load of cactus lay on his back at the foot of the cross with his head on a stone and another larger stone placed on his stomach, pressing him more firmly into the backpack of cactus.

At 100 paces, Lummis was too far away from the scene to get the shot he wanted. So he decided to press his luck by asking permission to move closer. "In gracious response to my request, the Hermano Mayor paced off thirty feet from the foot of the cross and marked a spot to which I might advance in order to get a larger picture," Lummis wrote. "And there we stood facing each other, the crucified and I – the one playing with the most wonderful toy of modern progress, the other racked by the most barbarous device of nineteen hundred years ago. What ambitious amateur ever dreamed of focusing on such a sight?"

As they tightened the ropes, the man on the cross 'sobbed like a child,' Lummis reported.