“He says,” the son interpreted, “that we are bent on such sacrilege that the very sands cry out against us. He will go no nearer to the dread abode of Chia. Nor will I. His father died there, as is well known amongst the Mayas. He says he will not die there. He says he is not old enough to die.”
“The miserable octogenarian!” Francis laughed, and was startled by the ghostly, mocking laugh of the echo, while all about them the sand-dunes bayed in chorus. “Too youthful to die! How about you, Leoncia? Are you too young to die yet a while?”
“Say,” she smiled back, moving her foot slightly so as to bring a moan of reproach from the sand beneath it. “On the contrary, I am too old to die just because the cliffs echo our laughter back at us and because the sandhills bark at us. Come, let us go on. We are very close to those flashings. Let the old man wait within his circle until we come back.”
She cast off their hands and stepped forward, and as they followed, all the dunes became inarticulate, while one, near to them, down the sides of which ran a slide of sand, rumbled and thundered. Fortunately for them, as they were soon to learn, Francis, at abandoning the mules, had equipped himself with a coil of thin, strong rope.
Once across the sands they encountered more echoes. On trials, they found their halloes distinctly repeated as often as six or eight times.
“Hell’s bells,” said Henry. “No wonder the natives fight shy of such a locality!”
“Wasn’t it Mark Twain who wrote about a man whose hobby was making a collection of echoes?” Francis queried.
“Never heard of him. But this is certainly some fine collection of Maya echoes. They chose the region wisely for a hiding place. Undoubtedly it was always sacred, even before the Spaniards came. The old priests knew the natural causes of the mysteries, and passed them over to the herd as mystery with a capital ‘M’ and supernatural in origin.”
Not many minutes afterward they emerged on an open, level space, close under a crannied and ledge-ribbed cliff, and exchanged their single-file mode of progression to three-abreast. The ground was a hard, brittle crust of surface, so crystalline and dry as never to suggest that it was aught else but crystalline and dry all the way down. In an ebullition of spirits, desiring to keep both men on an equality of favor, Leoncia seized their hands and started them into a run. At the end of half a dozen strides the disaster happened. Simultaneously Henry and Francis broke through the crust, sinking to their thighs, and Leoncia was only a second behind them in breaking through and sinking almost as deep.
“Hell’s bells!” Henry muttered. “It’s the very devil’s own landscape.”
And his low-spoken words were whispered back to him from the nearby cliffs on all sides and endlessly and sibilantly repeated.
Not at first did they fully apprehend their danger. It was when, by their struggles, they found themselves waist-deep and steadily sinking, that the two men grasped the gravity of the situation. Leoncia still laughed at the predicament, for it seemed no more than that to her.
“Quicksand,” Francis gasped.
“Quicksand!” all the landscape gasped back at him, and continued to gasp it in fading ghostly whispers, repeating it and gossiping about it with gleeful unction.
“It’s a pot-hole filled with quicksand,” Henry corroborated.
“Maybe the old boy was right in sticking back there on the barking sands,” observed Francis.
The ghostly whispering redoubled upon itself and was a long time in dying away.
By this time they were midway between waist and arm-pits and sinking as methodically as ever.
“Well, somebody’s got to get out of the scrape alive,” Henry remarked.
And, even without discussing the choice, both men began to hoist Leoncia up, although the effort and her weight thrust them more quickly down. When she stood, free and clear, a foot on the nearest shoulder of each of the two men she loved, Francis said, though the landscape mocked him:
“Now, Leoncia, we’re going to toss you out of this. At the word ‘Go!’ let yourself go. And you must strike full length and softly on the crust. You’ll slide a little. But don’t let yourself stop. Keep on going. Crawl out to the solid land on your hands and knees. And, whatever you do, don’t stand up until you reach the solid land.—Ready, Henry?”
Between them, though it hastened their sinking, they swung her back and forth, free in the air, and, the third swing, at Francis’ “Go!” heaved her shoreward.
Her obedience to their instructions was implicit, and, on hands and knees, she gained the solid rocks of the shore.
“Now for the rope!” she called to them.
But by this time Francis was too deep to be able to remove the coil from around his neck and under one arm. Henry did it for him, and, though the exertion sank him to an equal deepness, managed to fling one end of the rope to Leoncia.
At first she pulled on it. Next, she fastened a turn around a boulder the size of a motor car, and let Henry pull. But it was in vain. The strain or purchase was so lateral that it seemed only to pull him deeper. The quicksand was sucking and rising over his shoulders when Leoncia cried out, precipitating a very Bedlam of echoes:
“Wait! Stop pulling! I have an idea! Give me all the slack! Just save enough of the end to tie under your shoulders!”
The next moment, dragging the rope after her by the other end, she was scaling the cliff. Forty feet up, where a gnarled and dwarfed tree rooted in the crevices, she paused. Passing the rope across the tree-trunk, as over a hook, she drew in the slack and made fast to a boulder of several hundredweight.
“Good for the girl!” Francis applauded to Henry.
Both men had grasped her plan, and success depended merely on her ability to dislodge the boulder and topple it off the ledge. Five precious minutes were lost, until she could find a dead branch of sufficient strength to serve as a crowbar. Attacking the boulder from behind and working with tense coolness while her two lovers continued to sink, she managed at the last to topple it over the brink.
As it fell, the rope tautened with a jerk that fetched an involuntary grunt from Henry’s suddenly constricted chest. Slowly, he arose out of the quicksand, his progress being accompanied by loud sucking reports as the sand reluctantly released him. But, when he cleared the surface, the boulder so outweighed him that he shot shoreward across the crust until directly under the purchase above, when the boulder came to rest on the ground beside him.
Only Francis’ head, arms, and tops of shoulders were visible above the quicksand when the end of the rope was flung to him. And, when he stood beside them on terra firma, and when he shook his fist at the quicksand he had escaped by so narrow a shave, they joined with him in deriding it. And a myriad ghosts derided them back, and all the air about them was woven by whispering shuttles into an evil texture of mockery.
CHAPTER XIV
“We can’t be a million miles away from it,” Henry said, as the trio came to pause at the foot of a high steep cliff. “If it’s any farther on, then the course lies right straight over the cliff, and, since we can’t climb it and from the extent of it it must be miles around, the source of those flashes ought to be right here.”
“Now could it have been a man with looking-glasses?” Leoncia ventured.
“Most likely some natural phenomenon,” Francis answered. “I’m strong on natural phenomena since those barking sands.”
Leoncia, who chanced to be glancing along the face of the cliff farther on, suddenly stiffened with attention and cried, “Look!”
Their eyes followed hers, and rested on the same point. What they saw was no flash, but a steady persistence of white light that blazed and burned like the sun. Following the base of the cliff at a scramble, both men remarked, from the density of vegetation, that there had been no travel of humans that way in many years. Breathless from their exertions, they broke out through the brush upon an open-space where a not-ancient slide of rock from the cliff precluded the growth of vegetable life.
Leoncia clapped her hands. There was no need for her to point. Thirty feet above, on the face of the cliff, were two huge eyes. Fully a fathom across was each of the eyes, their surfaces brazen with some white reflecting substance.
“The eyes of Chia!” she cried.
