BOOK V—THE HOUSE OF THE SERPENT
I
Maria-Teresa opened her eyes. What was this dream from which she had awakened, or into which she had fallen? Little Christobal’s plaintive voice brought her keen realization of the brutal truth. She held out her arms to the child, but felt neither his kisses nor his tears on her face. Her eyes were still heavy with magic sleep, and she opened them with difficulty.
When, gradually, she came out of the abyss of darkness and dreams into which she could be plunged almost instantly by the sacred sachets always ready in the hideous fists of the three living mummies; the mammaconas, too, had terrible perfumes which they burned round her in precious vases, sandia more pungent than incense, more hallucinating than opium, which transformed the Bride of the Sun into a beautiful living statue. Then they could sing their songs uninterruptedly, for Maria-Teresa had gone to another world, and heard nothing of what happened about her.
Curiously enough, her spirit then carried her back to the hour when the knock had come at her window in Callao and when, dropping the big green register to the floor, she had run to meet Dick. She was worried, too, by the ever present memory of an unfinished letter to their agent in Antwerp, which she had been writing when that other knock at the window had sent her running to Dick again. She remembered with horrible distinctness the appearance of the three living mummies, swaying in the darkness, and the feel on her mouth and face of the hands made parchment-like by the eternal night of the catacombs. Waking from this lethargic slumber, she thought she had shaken off a dream, but when her eyes opened, she no longer knew whether she had not just entered into a terrible dreamland.
When Maria-Teresa opened her eyes this time, she was in the House of the Serpent. She knew, for the mammaconas had told her, that when she awoke there she would be near unto death. There it was that Huayna Capac, father of the last King of the Incas, would come to fetch the bride offered to Atahualpa, and take her with him to the Enchanted Realms of the Sun. In the lucid moments left to her during the voyage, when she was given the nectar that kept her alive, the mammaconas had taught her the duties of the Bride, and the first principles of the faith to which she was to be sacrificed.