But now the Awataba were talking for themselves in awkward guttural clicks and clucking noises, peeping at us from under beetling brows and hanging mats of muddy hair, prostrating themselves anew at a wrinkle showing in Wiki's face; but withal, demonstrating a dumb persistency, a blunt determination, that reminded me of the smoke that swirled daily above the valley cliffs.
Kachina gasped.
"They are asking for you," she interpreted. "They say they have dreamed that if they sacrifice you three their wanderings will come to an end and they will always have food."
Wiki checked her with an order which sent the snake priests to close around us. They herded us out of the crowd and up to the temple roof, making signs that we were to enter the room assigned to us. In there we could neither see nor hear anything of what went on, and leaving one man to watch us from the terrace, they hastened back to take their share in the decision of our fate.
CHAPTER XIX
PETER'S BOULDER
There was no twilight in Homolobi. Buried beneath the jutting overhang of the Western cliff, the village was plunged in darkness the moment the sun had sunk behind it. One minute I looked through the narrow doorway of our room and saw the gaunt figure of the serpent priest, our sentinel, limned against the gray house-walls across the temple plaza. Then the enveloping gloom had swallowed him. Only upon the distant Eastern cliffs of the valley a few crimson beams clashed harshly upon the painted rock strata, flickered courageously—and vanished, too.
But immediately other lights flared up. The plaza, whence rose—had risen this hour—a continuous hum and buzz of comment, of a sudden glared with torches. More torches shone on the opposite house-roofs, and from the unseen depths of the valley at the foot of the Breast blossomed a great flower of light that grew and grew, accompanied by a muted roar of savage voices, dissonant, unrestrained.
The voices of Homolobi were stilled—as though Wild had suppressed all with one wave of his feathered paho. The village became wrapped in the silence of death. And now our ears could hear distinctly that gritting insanity of frenzied noise, rising and falling with the leaping of the flames that streaked hundreds of feet into the air to illumine the darkness beyond the village walls. They were faint, far away, but the savage insistency of their chorus was unescapable, even when the hum of the village began knew.
"The Awataba," I muttered, more to myself than to the others.