"The name has an ancient ring," she smiled.
"I am the ancient Da Vasco," he pursued, advancing unsummoiied. She smiled at his temerity but did not stay him. "This is the helmet I wore four hundred years ago when I led the ancestors of the Lost Souls into this valley." The Queen smiled quiet unbelief, as she quietly asked:
"Then you were born four hundred years ago?"
"Yes, and never. I was never born. I am Da Vasco. I have always been. My home is in the sun."
Her delicately stenciled brows drew quizzically to interrogation, though she said nothing. From a gold-wrought box beside her on the divan she pinched what seemed a powder between a fragile and almost transparent thumb and forefinger, and her thin beautiful lips curved to gentle mockery as she casually tossed the powder into the great tripod. A sheen of smoke arose and in a moment was lost to sight.
"Look!" she commanded.
And Torres, approaching the great bowl, gazed into it. What he saw, the rest of his party never learned. But the Queen herself leaned forward and gazing down from above, saw with him, her face a beautiful advertisement of gentle and pitying mockery. And what Torres himself saw was a bedroom and a birth in the second story of the Bocas del Tore house he had inherited. Pitiful it was, with its last secrecy exposed, as was the gently smiling pity in the Queen's face. And, in that flashing glimpse of magic vision, Torres saw confirmed about himself what he had always guessed and suspected.
"Would you see more," the Queen softly mocked. "I have shown you the beginning of you. Look now, and behold your ending."
But Torres, too deeply impressed by what he had already seen, shuddered away in recoil.
"Forgive me, Beautiful Woman," he pleaded. "And let me pass. Forget, as I shall hope ever to forget."