“Suddenly—without further warning—Xyntli stood, straight and tall, in the top of the mountain, borne up on the servant-winds that live with her inside!
“Her veil wrapped her from head to foot, and its loose folds were blown upward by the breath of the winds. Her hair streamed through its topmost folds like gleaming flames; and the blue flashes that shot forth from the veil might have been the anger that flared in her blue eyes when she saw the outside of her mountain!
“Now, for the snakes!
“She gave a strange, wailing cry—like the wind, or flames rushing up the black throat of the chimney—and down in the depths of the mountain her fiery serpents came writhing out of their caverns, obedient to her call. The blue cone and the whole countryside shuddered with their motion; and as their hot breath scorched the inside of the mountain, thick black smoke arose like thunderclouds, and blotted out the sun. Then the heads of the fiery monsters peered over the rim at the mountain’s top, and they came crawling, gliding down its sides.
“And the very fiercest, hungriest of them all was rushing straight to the village of bird-cage huts, nestling in the hollow upon the slope of the mountain!
“It was a splendid sight—the mighty cone, purple in the midday darkness, with the green forest at its base, and the serpents, like rivers of fire, pouring down its sides. Smoke and flame rose, streaming upward, where they passed.
“And in the midst of the murky clouds, on the mountain-top, stood Xyntli, beautiful exceedingly, in her iridescent, gray veil, with her glittering, red-gold hair. Swaying lightly on the shoulders of her servant-winds, waving her arms and crying, she urged on her fiery snakes, that were to restore her kingdom to her as she would have it—clean, smooth, unbroken;—the pattern of a perfect mountain!
“But the people in the village saw the terror, not the beauty; and they thought only of their flight from it.
“They huddled the babies and the old people who couldn’t walk and their few poor possessions onto the ox-carts. Some of them tried to drive the spotted pigs before them; and any one who has tried to drive one pig (a plain one at that) can imagine how much confusion it made when there were dozens and dozens. And it’s not to be wondered at, that the aunts and the grandmother didn’t count correctly. So they didn’t miss the Bee Baby until they were far away; and the body of Xyntli’s hideous snake lay stretched across the blackened hollow where the little huts had stood in the green grove.
