The Flute of the Gods

by Marah Ellis Ryan

“In the Light beyond the light I wait for you at 317 the trail’s end,” she said, and laughed that his hand rested on her breast.

And the sun, blood red, came over the edge of the world, and Don Ruy cried aloud at the lifted hand of Tahn-té, and the gleam of the white flint knife.

But the guard closed in, and one of his own men caught him, and asked for pardon afterwards, and when he could again see the altar, the knife was red, and a heart was held outward to the sun that looked like the flame of burning worlds.

And a long, shivering, high keyed chant of the Te-hua people went upwards to the sky, that the gods might know they were witness. But in the midst of it the rumbling as of thunder was under their feet and the earth rocked. Sulphurous fumes came upwards from the long closed crevices of the solitary mesa; and to the south there was the crash as of falling worlds, and the great mesa of The Face lifted before their eyes, and settled again as a wave of the river lifts and breaks on the shore.

The chant of the sacrifice was silenced on their lips, and they fled downward at that sight, for the face of the God-Maid of the mesa no longer looked upwards to the sun! The outline of the brow, and the cheek, and the dainty woman’s chin they could still see;––but the face was turned from them––turned toward the south––where the gods have ever gone in an evil season!

And only Don Ruy Sandoval saw the heart put back in the breast of the witch maid, and saw her wrapped in the white robe of the Po-Ahtun-ho, and saw the crevice where the Powers of the Underworld had opened a grave for her there on the Mesa of the Hearts.

And even he watched afar off; for there was that in 318 the face of the Indian priest not to be understood by the white man who felt both pity and horror.

But he waited at the foot of the mesa, and held the canoe while the Po-Ahtun-ho, who had the logic of a white man, but the heart of an Indian, came down and entered it in silence, and as they crossed the river, stared as though scarcely seeing it, at The Face now turned southwards on the mesa.

“You––loved her?” said Don Ruy at last and something of the tone of a lover in the voice made Tahn-té close his eyes for a moment, and then look at the Castilian. He did not need to speak.

“Yet––you could do––that?”