I wish I could do justice to this man's language, which was grandly figurative, or to his dramatic way of talking, accompanied as it was with look and gesture that would have elicited applause on any European stage. I cannot do so, therefore shall not try; but the following is the pith of his story.
This Indian's house was on the very outside and most northerly end of the great wild plateau which was the home of these savages and cannibals.
The queen, a terrible monarch, and bloodthirsty in the extreme, used to hold her court and lived on a strange mountain or hill, in the very centre of the rough tree and bush clad plain.
For many, many a long year she had lived here, and to her court Indians came from afar to do her homage, bringing with them cloth of crimson, wine and oil, which they had stolen or captured in warfare from the white men of Madeira valley.
When these presents came, the coca which her courtiers used to chew all day long, and the maté they drank, were for a time--for weeks indeed--discarded for the wine and fire-water of the pale-face.
Fearful were the revels then held on that lone mountain.
The queen was dainty, so too were her fierce courtiers.
When the revels first began she and they could eat the raw or half-roasted flesh of calves and baby-llamas, but when their potations waxed deeper, and appetite began to fail, then the orgies commenced in earnest. Nothing would her majesty eat now--horrible to say--but children, and her courtiers, armed to the teeth, would be sent to scour the plains, to visit the mud huts of her people, and drag therefrom the most beautiful and plump boys or girls procurable.
I will not tell of the fearful and awfully unnatural human sacrifice--the murder of the innocents--that now took place.
Demons could not have been more revolting in their cruelties than were those savage courtiers as they obeyed the queen's behests.