Fifteen minutes were lost ere Henry and Francis succeeded in only partly convincing him, by repeated trials of their voices, that the thing was an echo.
Half an hour later, they debouched on a series of abrupt-rolling sand-dunes. Again the old man shrank back. From the sand in which they strode, arose a clamor of noise. When they stood still, all was still. A single step, and all the sand about them became vocal.
“When the God laughs, beware!” the old Maya warned.
Drawing a circle in the sand with his finger, which shouted at him as he drew it, he sank down within it on his knees, and as his knees contacted on the sand arose a very screaming and trumpeting of sound. The peon joined his father inside the noisy circle, where, with his forefinger, the old man was tracing screeching cabalistic figures and designs.
Leoncia was overcome, and clung both to Henry and Francis. Even Francis was perturbed.
“The echo was an echo,” he said. “But here is no echo. I don’t understand it. Frankly, it gets my goat.”
“Piffle!” Henry retorted, stirring the sand with his foot till it shouted again. “It’s the barking sand. On the island of Kauai, down in the Hawaiian Islands, I have been across similar barking sands——quite a place for tourists, I assure you. Only this is a better specimen, and much noisier. The scientists have a score of high-brow theories to account for the phenomenon. It occurs in several other places in the world, as I have heard. There’s only one thing to do, and that is to follow the compass bearing which leads straight across. Such sands do bark, but they have never been known to bite.”
But the last of the priests could not be persuaded out of his circle, although they succeeded in disturbing him from his prayers long enough to spout a flood of impassioned Maya speech.
“He says,” the son interpreted, “that we are bent on such sacrilege that the very sands cry out against us. He will go no nearer to the dread abode of Chia. Nor will I. His father died there, as is well known amongst the Mayas. He says he will not die there. He says he is not old enough to die.”
“The miserable octogenarian!” Francis laughed, and was startled by the ghostly, mocking laugh of the echo, while all about them the sand-dunes bayed in chorus. “Too youthful to die! How about you, Leoncia? Are you too young to die yet a while?”