“Fiddlesticks!” he said. “It’s because of their advanced age. They’re all grandmas, I tell you—or ought to be. Great aunts, anyhow. Those girls were girls all right, weren’t they?”
“Yes—” Jeff agreed, still slowly. “But they weren’t afraid—they flew up that tree and hid, like schoolboys caught out of bounds—not like shy girls.”
“And they ran like marathon winners—you’ll admit that, Terry,” he added.
Terry was moody as the days passed. He seemed to mind our confinement more than Jeff or I did; and he harped on Alima, and how near he’d come to catching her. “If I had—” he would say, rather savagely, “we’d have had a hostage and could have made terms.”
But Jeff was getting on excellent terms with his tutor, and even his guards, and so was I. It interested me profoundly to note and study the subtle difference between these women and other women, and try to account for them. In the matter of personal appearance, there was a great difference. They all wore short hair, some few inches at most; some curly, some not; all light and clean and fresh-looking.
“If their hair was only long,” Jeff would complain, “they would look so much more feminine.”
I rather liked it myself, after I got used to it. Why we should so admire “a woman’s crown of hair” and not admire a Chinaman’s queue is hard to explain, except that we are so convinced that the long hair “belongs” to a woman. Whereas the “mane” in horses is on both, and in lions, buffalos, and such creatures only on the male. But I did miss it—at first.
Our time was quite pleasantly filled. We were free of the garden below our windows, quite long in its irregular rambling shape, bordering the cliff. The walls were perfectly smooth and high, ending in the masonry of the building; and as I studied the great stones I became convinced that the whole structure was extremely old. It was built like the pre-Incan architecture in Peru, of enormous monoliths, fitted as closely as mosaics.
“These folks have a history, that’s sure,” I told the others. “And SOME time they were fighters—else why a fortress?”
I said we were free of the garden, but not wholly alone in it. There was always a string of those uncomfortably strong women sitting about, always one of them watching us even if the others were reading, playing games, or busy at some kind of handiwork.