Graydon thought there was admiration in the voice; wondered whether all that delectable beauty was after all but a mask for primitive woman, worshiping brute strength; looked into the eyes scanning Sterrett’s bulk, noted the curious speculation within them, and knew that whatever the reason for her comment it was not that which his fleeting thought had whispered. She looked at him, questioningly.
“Are you his enemy?” she asked.
“No,” said Graydon, “we travel together.”
“Then why,” she pointed to the out stretched figure, “why did you do this to him? Why did you not let him have his way with me?”
Graydon flushed, uncomfortably. The question, with all its subtle implications, cut. What kind of a beast did she think him? His denfense of her had been elementary—as well be asked to explain why he did not stand by and watch idly while a child was being murdered!
“What do you think I am?” His voice shook with half shamed wrath. “No man stands by and lets a thing like that go on.”
She looked at him, curiously; but her eyes had softened.
“No?” she asked. “No man does? Then what is he?”
Graydon found no answer. She took a step closer to him, her slim fingers again touching the bruises on her cheek.
“Do you not wonder,” she said—“now do you not wonder why I do not call my people to deal him the punishment he has earned?”
“I do wonder,” Graydon’s perplexity was frank. “I wonder indeed. Why do you not call them—if they are close enough to hear?”
“And what would you do were they to come?” she whispered.
“I would not let them have him—alive,” he answered. “Nor me!”
“Perhaps,” she said, slowly, “perhaps—knowing that—is why—I do not call them!”
Suddenly she smiled upon him—and it was as though a draft of wild sweet wine had been lifted to his lips. He took a swift step toward her. She drew up to her slim lithe height, thrust out a warning hand.
“I am—Suarra,” she said; then, “and I am—Death!”
And odd chill passed through Graydon. Again he realized the unfamiliar, the alien beauty of her. Was there truth after all in those legends of the haunted Cordillera? He had never doubted that there was some thing behind the terror of the Indians, the desertion of the arrieros. Was she one of its spirits, its—demons? For an instant the fantasy seemed no fantasy. Then reason returned. This girl a demon! He laughed.
She frowned at that laughter.
“Do not laugh,” she said. “The death I mean is not such as you who live beyond the high rim of our land may know. It is death that blots out not alone the body, but that lord whose castle is the body; that which looks out through the windows of your eyes—that presence, that flame, you believe can never die. That, too, our death blots out; makes as though it never had been. Or letting it live, changes it in—dreadful—ways. Yet, because you came to me in my need—nay, more because of something I sense within you—something that calls out to me and to which I must listen and do desire to listen—because of this I would not have that death come to you.”
Strange as were her words, Graydon hardly heard them; certainly did not then realize fully their meaning, lost still as he was in wonder.
What was this girl doing here in these wild mountains with her bracelets of gold and the royal Inca feathers on her lovely little head? No demon of the wilderness, she! Absurd! She was living, desirable, all human.
Yet she was of no race he knew. Despite the caraquenque plumes—not of the Incas.
But she was of pure blood—the blood of kings. Yes, that was it—a princess of some proud empire, immemoriably ancient, long lost! But what empire?
“How you came by the watchers, I do not know. How you passed unseen by them I do not know. Nor how you came so far within this forbidden land. Tell me,” her voice was imperious, “why came you here at all?”
Graydon stirred. It was a command.
“We came from afar,” he said, “on the track of a great treasure of gold and gems; the treasure of Atahualpa, the Inca. There were certain signs that led us. They brought us here. And here we lost them. And found soon that we, too, were lost.”
“Atahualpa,” she nodded. “Yes, his people did come here. We took them—and their treasure!”
Graydon stared at her, jaw dropping in amazement.
“You—you took them—and the treasure!” he gasped.
“Yes,” she nodded, indifferently, “it lies somewhere in one of the thirteen caves. It was nothing to us—to us of Yu-Atlanchi where treasures are as the sands in the stream bed. A grain of sand, it was, among many. But the people of Atahualpa were welcome—since we needed new folks to care for the Xinli and to feed the wisdom of the Snake Mother.”
“The Snake Mother!” exclaimed Graydon.
The girl touched the bracelet on her right arm. And Graydon, looking close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved a serpent with a woman’s head and woman’s breasts and arms. It lay coiled upon a great dish held high on the paws of four animals. The shapes of these did not at once register upon his consciousness—so absorbed was he in his study of that coiled figure.
And now he saw that this face was not really that of a woman. It was reptilian. But so strongly had the maker feminized it, so great was the suggestion of womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly the eyes saw it as woman, forgetting all that was of the serpent.
Her eyes were of some small, glittering, intensely purple stone. And as Graydon looked he felt that those eyes were alive—that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That they were, in fact, prolongations of some one’s—some thing’s—vision!
And suddenly the figure seemed to swell, the coils to move, the eyes come closer.
He tore his gaze away; drew back, dizzily.
The girl was touching one of the animals that held up the bowl or shield or whatever it was that held the snake woman.
“The Xinli,” she said.
Graydon looked; looked and felt increase of bewilderment. For he knew what those animals were. And, knowing, knew that he looked upon the incredible.
They were dinosaurs! Those gigantic, monstrous grotesques that ruled earth millions upon millions of years ago, and but for whose extinction, so he had been taught, man could never have developed.
Who in this Andean wilderness could know or could have known the dinosaur? Who here could have carved, the monsters with such life-like detail as these possessed? Why, it was only yesterday that science had learned what really were their huge bones, buried so long that the rocks had molded themselves around them in adamantine matrix. And laboriously, with every modern resource still haltingly and laboriously, science had set those bones together as a perplexed child a picture puzzle, and timidly put forth what it believed to be reconstructions of these long vanished chimeras of earth’s nightmare youth.
Yet here, far from all science it must surely be, some one had modeled those same monsters for a woman’s bracelet. Why then, it followed that whoever had done this must have had before him the living forms from which to work. Or, if not, copies of those forms set down accurately by ancient men who had seen them. And either or both these things were incredible.
What were these people to whom this girl belonged? People who—what was it she had said—could blot out both body and soul or change the soul to some dreadful thing? There had been a name—
Yu-Atlanchi.
“Suarra,” he said, “where is Yu-Atlanchi?