THE INTERVIEW.
Marksman followed Atoyac to the Palace of the Virgins of the Sun. In spite of himself, the intrepid hunter felt his heart contract when he thought of the perilous situation in which he was about to place himself, and the terrible consequences discovery would entail. Still, he stood up against this emotion, and succeeded in regaining sufficient power over himself to affect a tranquillity and indifference which were far from real. The two men walked silently side by side. The hunter, fearing this prolonged dumbness might inspire his pride with doubts, resolved to make him talk, in order to give his thoughts a different direction from that he feared to see them take. "My brother has travelled much?" he asked him.
"Where is the warrior of our race whose life has not been spent in long journeys?" the Indian answered, sententiously. "The Palefaces—my brother knows it better than I—chase us like wild beasts, and compel us incessantly to retire before their successive encroachments."
"That is true," the hunter said, shaking his head with a melancholy air. "What desert is so obscure in which we are now permitted to hide the bones of our fathers, with the certainty that the plough of the whites will not come to crush them in tracing its interminable furrow, and scatter them in every direction?"
"Alas!" Atoyac observed, "the red race is accursed. The day will come when it will be sought in vain on the immense plains where it was formerly more numerous than the brilliant stars which stud the vault of heaven; for it is fatally condemned to disappear from the surface of the world. The Palefaces are only the terrible implements of the implacable wrath of the Wacondah against the children of the red family."
"My father only speaks too well. Formerly our race was all-powerful; now it has fallen lower than the vilest slave, and has no hope left it of ever rising again."
"What has become of the powerful emperors of Anahuac, who commanded the whole earth? Of the numberless cities they founded, but five compose today the territory of Tlapalean.[1] They are the last refuges of the children of Quetyalcoalt,[2] who are forced to hide themselves there like timid deer, instead of boldly treading the countries possessed in old times by their ancestors."
"But, thanks be rendered to the Wacondah, whose power is infinite, these five cities are completely sheltered from the insults of the Gachupinos."
Atoyac shook his head sadly, "My father is mistaken," he said. "Where is the hidden spot to which Palefaces do not penetrate?"
"That is possible. They effect everything; but up to the present no Paleface has gazed on Quiepaa Tani. They have not been able to cross the mountains and traverse the deserts, behind which the sacred city rises calm and peaceful, deriding the vain efforts of its enemies to discover it."