“Shall we use the old lingo—French?” Bastin asked the question in the Bohemian Parisian they had been wont to use together years before.
“As you please, Ralph,” Hammond replied.
“I have told you hurriedly something of where I have been,” Bastin began. “But I have reserved my great story until I could tell it to you here——” He glanced down at the child at his feet. “I heard,” he went on, “when at La Caribe—as everyone hears who stays long in the place—that each year, in spite of the laws of the whites, who are in power, a child is sacrificed to the Carib deities, and I longed to know if it were true.
“During my first few week’s sojourn on the little island of Utilla, I was able to render one of the old priests a service, which somehow became so exaggerated in his eyes that there was almost literally nothing that he would not do for me, and eventually he yielded to my entreaties to give me a chance to see for myself the yearly sacrifice, which was due in a month’s time.
“During that month of waiting I made many sketches of this wonderful neighbourhood, and became acquainted with this little Carib maiden, painting her in three or four different ways. The child became intensely attached to me, and I to her, and we were always together in the daytime.
“As the time drew near for the sacrifice I noticed that the little one grew very elated, and there was a new flash in her eyes, a kind of rapturous pride. I asked her no question as to this change, putting it down as girlish pride in being painted by the ‘white prince,’ as she insisted on calling me.
“I need not trouble you, my dear fellow, with unnecessary details of how and where the old priest led me on the eventful night, which was a black as Erebus, but come to the point where the real interest begins.
“It was midnight when at last I had been smuggled into that mysterious cave, which, if only a tithe of what is reported be half true, has been damned by some of the awfullest deeds ever perpetrated. My priest-guide had made me swear, before starting, that whatever I saw I would make no sign, utter no sound, telling me that if I did, and we were discovered, we should both be murdered there and then.
“We had hardly hidden ourselves before the whole centre of the cave became illuminated with a mauve-coloured flame that burned up from a flat brass brazier, and seemed like the coloured fires used in pantomime effects on the English stage. By this wonderful light I saw a hundred and fifty or more Carib men and women file silently into the cave, and take up their positions in orderly rows all round the place. When they had all mustered, a sharp note was struck upon the carimba, a curious one-stringed instrument, and the circles of silent savages dropped into squatting position on their heels. Then the weirdest of all weird music began, the instruments being a drum, a flute, and the carimba.
“But my whole attention became absorbed by the grouping in the centre of the room—the fire-dish had been shifted to one side, and I saw a hideous statue, squatted on a rudely-constructed, massive table, the carved hands gripping a bowl that rested on the stone knees of the image. The head of the hideous god was encircled with a very curious band, that looked, from where I stood, like bead and grass and feather work. The face—cheeks and forehead—was scored with black, green and red paint, the symbolic colours of that wondrous race that once filled all Central America.