“Say,” she smiled back, moving her foot slightly so as to bring a moan of reproach from the sand beneath it. “On the contrary, I am too old to die just because the cliffs echo our laughter back at us and because the sandhills bark at us. Come, let us go on. We are very close to those flashings. Let the old man wait within his circle until we come back.”
She cast off their hands and stepped forward, and as they followed, all the dunes became inarticulate, while one, near to them, down the sides of which ran a slide of sand, rumbled and thundered. Fortunately for them, as they were soon to learn, Francis, at abandoning the mules, had equipped himself with a coil of thin, strong rope.
Once across the sands they encountered more echoes. On trials, they found their halloes distinctly repeated as often as six or eight times.
“Hell’s bells,” said Henry. “No wonder the natives fight shy of such a locality!”
“Wasn’t it Mark Twain who wrote about a man whose hobby was making a collection of echoes?” Francis queried.
“Never heard of him. But this is certainly some fine collection of Maya echoes. They chose the region wisely for a hiding place. Undoubtedly it was always sacred, even before the Spaniards came. The old priests knew the natural causes of the mysteries, and passed them over to the herd as mystery with a capital ‘M’ and supernatural in origin.”
Not many minutes afterward they emerged on an open, level space, close under a crannied and ledge-ribbed cliff, and exchanged their single-file mode of progression to three-abreast. The ground was a hard, brittle crust of surface, so crystalline and dry as never to suggest that it was aught else but crystalline and dry all the way down. In an ebullition of spirits, desiring to keep both men on an equality of favor, Leoncia seized their hands and started them into a run. At the end of half a dozen strides the disaster happened. Simultaneously Henry and Francis broke through the crust, sinking to their thighs, and Leoncia was only a second behind them in breaking through and sinking almost as deep.
“Hell’s bells!” Henry muttered. “It’s the very devil’s own landscape.”
And his low-spoken words were whispered back to him from the nearby cliffs on all sides and endlessly and sibilantly repeated.
Not at first did they fully apprehend their danger. It was when, by their struggles, they found themselves waist-deep and steadily sinking, that the two men grasped the gravity of the situation. Leoncia still laughed at the predicament, for it seemed no more than that to her.