'
'Do as I bid you, son,' I said, 'and I charge you not to leave this
place until I come for you again.'
Now I passed out of the storehouse, shutting the door behind me. A
minute later I wished that I had stayed where I was, since on the
platform my eyes were greeted by a sight more dreadful than any that
had gone before. For there, advancing towards us, were the women divided
into four great companies, some of them bearing infants in their arms.
They came singing and leaping, many of them naked to the middle. Nor
was this all, for in front of them ran the pabas and such of the women
themselves as were persons in authority. These leaders, male and female,
ran and leaped and sang, calling upon the names of their demon-gods,
and celebrating the wickednesses of their forefathers, while after them
poured the howling troops of women.
To and fro they rushed, now making obeisance to the statue of Huitzel,
now prostrating themselves before his hideous sister, the goddess of
Death, who sat beside him adorned with her carven necklace of men's
skulls and hands, now bowing around the stone of sacrifice, and now
thrusting their bare arms into the flames of the holy fire. For an hour
or more they celebrated this ghastly carnival, of which even I, versed
as I was in the Indian customs, could not fully understand the meaning,
and then, as though some single impulse had possessed them, they
withdrew to the centre of the open space, and, forming themselves into a
double circle, within which stood the pabas, of a sudden they burst into
a chant so wild and shrill that as I listened my blood curdled in my
veins.
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