The old creature passed her brown bones of fingers over her uncanny face and, staring into the face of the sun, began to mutter strangely again about the search for the Ark. A fantastic being, the girl thought, trudging over the earth after a chimera.
Julie told her that the medicine drove the pain away, but that, because of the heat, perhaps, she could not eat or sleep well, and that there came to her the strangest dreams in the world. In them the earth became transparent—she could see clearly through it. She could see people grow, bit by bit, under her eyes; and the forest, by some deep instinct, knew her, and the flowers laughed and cried like children.
The old woman said that all this was true; that in the old days when she lived in the splendors of the world the jungle used to be very hostile to her and would tear at her with its teeth and sprinkle her with its poisons and set its reptiles against her; but now that she had made friends with it she could go through the heart of it and never be hurt. She described how she plucked her herbs, male and female in equal proportion, out of jungles where no man’s foot had touched, when the benign forces of the air preponderated over the malign.
Julie said that the body was a stupid abiding place after these dreams, which put upon her soul marvelous new moods, like a moon forever at the full.
The old woman clutched at the wheel of the carromata and stared at her with unfathomable eyes. “Why did you not come with me when I asked you?” she entreated. “You and I could have freed ourselves from the wickedness of the earth, which is a heavy black bundle tied to the back of mortals. We would have searched for the lost Covenant between God and Man.”
For an instant a weird vision rose before the girl of the places those footsteps would lead to, down dirty by-ways of the East, catching one’s food where one could, brushing skirts with lepers and thieves, in hazes of furnace heat. Thank heaven, not all the incarnations of the East could bring her to a thing like that! And yet for an instant the preposterous invitation had sent an odd thrill through her. This nondescript old woman had touched her soul.
She smiled sadly, and shook her head, and the witch, dropping back from the wheel, moved away, muttering, “Adios!”
And that was the last of her that Julie ever saw.
A few days later, she returned this way from the Señor’s, to obtain a fresh supply of medicine. Only one pellet lay in the box at home. But from the shack opposite the school, the old woman had disappeared, without leaving a sign behind her. Because of the manner of her going, the Stall-keeper was positive that she would never come back.
In frightened dismay, Julie inquired of Mariana and Clarino, both of whom had secretly bought amulets of the old woman—Mariana, to enable herself to withstand the attraction of an unusually eligible lover; and Clarino, to become the principal of a school, to which honor he fearfully aspired. But neither knew anything about her: she was a wandering witch, no doubt, who had perhaps gone away on a broomstick into the sky.