It was some time before the boys could see all of this strange procession—strange in itself and stranger still for the place it was in. Their first thought, and the one they clung to, was that it was some horrible festival which would end in a cannibal orgy in the manner that had been described to Diego by the natives from whom he had learned to speak the Indian tongue.
They watched it with a sort of fascinated abhorrence, and in their thoughts were deciding how they would escape it by climbing higher up the mountain. Nearer and nearer it came along the way they had come. Nearer and nearer to where they had turned to seek their hiding-place. It was there.
“Juan,” gasped Diego, “it is coming up the mountain!”
By it he meant the procession; and it certainly had turned up almost in the very footsteps of the boys. They shrank back, but still watching the coming crowds, which, now at the ascent, had ceased to dance, though the singing and drum-beating continued.
And as they came nearer, the boys all the while wondering what their errand could be, it was easy to see that the man who led was a personage of importance; for he was covered with ornaments of gold, and wore a coronet of the same metal, with a head-dress of feathers rising above it. The men who followed him were ornamented in quite another way, being tattooed all over the body with grotesque figures.
The girls, who came next, carried baskets of fruit and flowers, and were decked out with gold and other ornaments. The men and women farther down the line were loaded with as much as they could carry in the way of finery, but carried neither fruit nor flowers.
All of this the boys could see because they did not dare to stir and were protected from observation by the shrubs that grew about the opening where they had taken shelter. Their hearts were in their mouths for fear of discovery, and they crouched side by side, very unwilling spectators of the scene that followed, and yet interested.
The leading person, whom the boys took to be either a high-priest or a cacique, approached within twenty yards of the boys and stood there until an attendant hurried up with a stool of a dark polished wood, and placed it conveniently for him to sit, he meanwhile never ceasing to beat his drum.