A wild, weird chant was struck up, then all moved slowly forward.
“How strange! How—how fascinating!” whispered Jean.
“Like a march of triumph,” Johnny whispered back.
In and out among the palms the procession wound. There appeared to be no end to that trail. Whence had come these people? Whither were they bound?
“Now where are we?” Johnny asked, an air of mystery in his voice.
As if in answer to his query, a great brown shaft, elaborately carved and gray with the moss of centuries, reared itself up before them. Beyond this they came at once into cleared spaces where were cornfields and pastures with goats grazing in them. Beside the trail were stone cottages with thatched roofs. Beside these dwellings women sat weaving cloth on narrow looms while others working over strange stone bowls beat soaked corn into batter.
“The wild Mayas,” the girl whispered with a thrill in her tone. “We have found them! At last we have found them!”
“And they have found us,” Johnny’s tone was solemn. “We are in their hands. This is their land. When shall we leave it? Ever?”
It was strange, weird, fascinating, this march of the Mayas. The rhythmic chant, the all but inaudible pat-pat of their bare feet, the sighing wind in the palms that waved like plumes above their heads, all this stamped deep into the minds of the boy and the girl impressions that time will never erase.
It was a march, a grand processional, but where to? What was to be the end of it? Armed to the teeth, these men had but a short half hour before been following, surrounding them, perhaps planning to kill them as intruders in their secret land. What of the present? Was this a march done in their honor? Was Johnny being thought of as a hero because of having saved the life of that beautiful Indian girl, and was this march given in his honor? Or was it a ceremonial march which would end with their being sacrificed to some gods, black, green or gold?
As he pondered these questions, Johnny remembered something he had read in Hardgrave’s book, something that had made his blood run cold. The Mayas did offer sacrifices to their gods, or at least they had in olden times. And now, as he recalled it, he understood the presence of those pools along the trail. The Maya country was a land without streams. It was a limestone country. All the water ran in underground grottos. From time to time one of these grottos caved in, forming a pool. That was the secret of the pools they had seen. Some of these pools held more terrible secrets. Some of them were thousands of years old. A party of scientists, coming upon one of these in a territory that had been abandoned by the Mayas, had found not only rich treasure in ornaments of gold, silver, onyx and jade, but human skulls as well. The lives of those whose skulls lay hidden for so many years beneath the water had been sacrificed to some god. What god? The god of the rising sun? of the noon-day sun? of the setting sun? of fire? of water? Who could tell. There lay their skulls, mute testimony of the death they had died.
