We crossed an irrigation-ditch at this point, and I commented upon its excellent workmanship. He nodded his head without replying, but his manner declared as if he had shouted it: "Fool of a white man! Do you think your people are the only ones who can work in stone?"
I essayed once again to draw him out.
"How is it that you have no fear of the Awataba?" I asked.
"They are children," he answered in his earlier phrase.
"But they are many times your number."
"They fear us."
We had entered the walled enclosures at the base of the Breast, and he waved his hand to the bursting storehouses.
"When they starve they ask us for food, and if we have it to spare, we give them some. They know that if they fight us, we would never lift a hand to aid them, and they are too ignorant to help themselves."
I had no opportunity for further conversation, for we had come to the first of a series of ladders, each wide enough for two people to climb it at once, propped in ledges of the cliff-side. Wiki went up them, hand over hand, with the agility of a sailor. As I put my foot upon the lowest rung to follow him, I heard a giggle behind me, and Kachina pushed in front, dragging Tawannears by the hand. She had discovered a new game, it seemed, which consisted in her pointing to a given object and pronouncing its name in her tongue, and then having Tawannears christen it in the Seneca dialect. She was going into all the details of the ladder and the trail with him—his face a study in rapture and sheepishness—when Wiki called down a sharp command to her. She sobered instantly, and raced up the ladders after the priest, who continued beside her.
The people of Homolobi watched our ascent with grins of amusement. The feat looked simple enough from the ground, but 'twas as difficult, in its way, as our climbing of the Ice Mountain of Tamanoas. The ladders were the easiest part of it. After them came several sections of rock-trail over the swell of the Breast as far as a projection which answered to the nipple, where another ladder led to the topmost section of the trail, which ran at an angle up to the entrance of the village walls, a door that Peter must turn sideways to enter.