At the same time it afforded them a good view of the country they had been traversing, and promised to enable them to see the new-comers without difficulty. And it fulfilled its promise in a very few minutes, giving the boys a sight of a most extraordinary and startling spectacle.
From out of the wood, not far from where they had just come, there emerged a fantastic procession, which moved with a rapidity that was really remarkable in view of the numbers of which it was composed.
[Illustration: “THE CLEFT PROVED TO BE A NARROW, CAVE-LIKE OPENING.”]
At the head of it came a man beating a sort of drum and moving at a rapid pace. Behind him were perhaps twenty men, all beating drums and chanting at the same time that they performed all sorts of singular antics, though without interfering with the rapid advance of the procession. Behind them again came hundreds of girls, dancing and singing in time with each other; and behind them came hundreds more of men and women, also singing and dancing with the greatest fervor.
It was some time before the boys could see all of this strange procession--strange in itself and stranger still for the place it was in. Their first thought, and the one they clung to, was that it was some horrible festival which would end in a cannibal orgy in the manner that had been described to Diego by the natives from whom he had learned to speak the Indian tongue.
They watched it with a sort of fascinated abhorrence, and in their thoughts were deciding how they would escape it by climbing higher up the mountain. Nearer and nearer it came along the way they had come. Nearer and nearer to where they had turned to seek their hiding-place. It was there.
“Juan,” gasped Diego, “it is coming up the mountain!”
By it he meant the procession; and it certainly had turned up almost in the very footsteps of the boys. They shrank back, but still watching the coming crowds, which, now at the ascent, had ceased to dance, though the singing and drum-beating continued.
And as they came nearer, the boys all the while wondering what their errand could be, it was easy to see that the man who led was a personage of importance; for he was covered with ornaments of gold, and wore a coronet of the same metal, with a head-dress of feathers rising above it. The men who followed him were ornamented in quite another way, being tattooed all over the body with grotesque figures.