decided it must be a wind which, following the chinks and crevices among the rocks, was simultaneously made to warble and was deflected under the water. Its telltale bubbles no doubt came up somewhere else, and the pool revealed only the unearthly music of it. But there at that moment, and in those circumstances, I was ready enough to take the priest's word that it was the voice of a god.
Meanwhile, he was moving around the pool and studying it from various points, and finally he bent to plunge his arm in to the shoulder. He worked for a moment, then brought up his hand and opened it for me to see, saying 'Ndik diok.' I daresay the creature is some relation to the familiar land snail, but Zyanya's father had been mistaken to promise her a necklace of polished shells. The slimy slug carried no shell on its back, and had no other distinction that I could see.
But then the priest bent his head close to the slug in his palm and blew hard upon it. That evidently annoyed the creature, for it either urinated or defecated into his hand: a little smear of pale yellow matter. The priest carefully replaced the sea snail on its underwater rock, then held his cupped palm out for me to observe, and I shrank from the stink of that pale yellow substance. But, to my surprise, the smear in his hand began to change color: to a yellow-green, to a green-blue, to a blue-red that deepened and intensified until it was a vibrant purple.
Grinning, the man reached out and rubbed the substance onto my mantle front. The brilliant smudge still smelled abominable, but I knew it for the dye that would never fade or wash away. He gestured again for me to follow him, and we climbed the tumbled rocks while, with a combination of hand signs and his laconic Loochi, the priest explained about the ndik diok:
The men of the Zyu collected the snails and provoked their exudations only twice a year, on holy days selected by some complicated divination. Though there were thousands of the sea snails clinging among the rocks, each gave only a minute quantity of that substance. So the men had to go far out among those cataclysms of crashing water, and dive into them, to pry the slugs loose, make them excrete onto a hank of cotton thread or into a leather flask, then replace the creatures unharmed. The snails had to be kept alive for the next time of extraction, but the men were not so indispensable; in each of those half-yearly rituals, some four or five divers were drowned or dashed to death upon the rocks.
'But why go to all that trouble, and sacrifice so many of your people, and then refuse to profit from it?' I asked, and managed to make the priest understand. He beckoned again, and led me farther into a clammy grotto, and said proudly:
'Our Sea God whose voice you heard. Tiat Ndik.'
It was a crude and lumpy statue, since it consisted only of piled round rocks: a big boulder for the abdomen, a smaller for the chest, a yet smaller one for the head. But that whole worthless heap of inanimate rock was colored the glowing purple. And all about Tiat Ndik were stacked flasks full of the dye, and hanks of yarn colored with it: a buried treasure of incalculable value.
When we had climbed as far as the ridge again, the red-hot disk of Tonatiu was just sinking into the far western ocean and boiling up a steam of clouds. Then the disk was gone, and for an instant we saw Tonatiu's light shining through the sea out there where it thins at the brink of the world—a brief, bright flash of emerald green, no more. The priest and I made our way back toward where we had left the others, while he continued explaining: that the offerings of the purple dye were essential, or Tiat Ndik would entice no more fish to the nets of the Zyu.
I argued, 'For all these sacrifices and offerings, your Sea God lets you eke out a miserable fish-eating existence. Let me take your purple to market and I will bring you gold enough that you can buy a city. A city in a fair and pleasant country, brimming with far better foods than fish, and with slaves to serve them to you.'
He remained obdurate. 'The god would never allow. The purple cannot be sold.' After a moment he added, 'Sometimes we not eat fish, Yellow Eye.'
He smiled and pointed to where the four other priests stood around a driftwood fire. It was broiling two fresh-cut human thighs, spitted on my own spear. There was no sign of the rest of the boatman. Forcing my face to give no indication of the trepidation I felt, I took from my loincloth the wadded packet of gold dust and dropped it on the ground between me and the chief priest.
'Open it carefully,' I said, 'lest the wind get at it.' As he knelt and began to unfold the cloth, I went on, 'If I were to fill my canoe with your purple, I could bring back the boat almost as full of gold. But I offer this amount of gold for only as many flasks as I can carry in my own two arms.'
He had the cloth open then, and the heap of dust gleamed in the sunset light, and his four brother priests approached to ogle it over his crouching figure. He let some of the dust run through his fingers, then, holding the cloth in both hands, he bounced it gently to judge its weight. Without looking up at me, he said, 'You give this much gold for the purple. How much you give for the girl?'
'What girl?' I said, though my heart lurched.
'Her behind you.'
I flicked only a quick glance backward. Zyanya stood directly behind me, looking unhappy, and a little way behind her stood six or seven more men of the Zyu, eagerly craning to see around her and me, to eye the gold. The priest was still kneeling and weighing the packet between his hands when I turned again and swung my maquahuitl. The packet and his clutching hands dropped to the ground, though the priest barely swayed, staring in shock at the blood gushing from the stumps of his wrists.
The lesser priests and the fishermen rushed to converge—whether to grab for the liberated gold or to aid their chief, I do not know—but in that same instant I whirled, seized Zyanya's hand, plunged through the closing circle of men, and dragged her after me in a headlong run along the ridge and down its eastern side. We were briefly out of sight of the milling Zyu, and I made an abrupt left swerve to dodge among some boulders higher than our heads. The Zyu would give chase, and they would expect us to bolt for our canoe. But even if we could have reached and launched it, I had no experience of rowing a seagoing craft; the pursuers could probably have caught us merely by wading after us.
Some number of them did go running and shouting past our temporary hiding place—running in the direction of the beach, as I had hoped. 'Uphill now!' I said to Zyanya, and she wasted no breath in asking why, but climbed along with me. Most of that promontory was bare rock, and we had to pick our way carefully through clefts and crevices, so that we should not be visible to those below. Higher up, the mountain sprouted trees and shrubbery in which we could more effectively lose ourselves, but that green haven was still a long climb distant, and I worried that the local birds would give away our position. At every step we seemed to startle into flight a whole flock of sea gulls or pelicans or cormorants.
But then I noticed that the birds were rising not just from around us, but from all parts of the mountain—land birds as well: parakeets, doves, rock wrens—twittering and flying about aimlessly. And there were not just birds; animals normally furtive or nocturnal were also strangely in evidence: armadillos, iguanas, rock snakes—even an ocelot loped past without giving us a glance—and all the animals, like us, were moving uphill. Then, though the dusk had still a while to last before dark, I heard a coyote's mournful keening from somewhere on the heights, and not far ahead of us a sinuous skein of bats came spewing from some cranny—and I knew what was coming: one of the convulsions so common to that coast.
'Hurry,' I panted to the girl. 'Up there. Where the bats are coming from. Must be a cave. Dive for it.'
We found it just as the last bats departed, or we might have missed it altogether: a tunnel in the rock wide enough for us to wriggle into, side by side. How deep it went, I never found out, but somewhere far within there would have been a great cavern, for the bats had been a countless multitude and, as we lay together in the rock tunnel, we could smell from the farther interior an occasional whiff of their guano droppings. Suddenly everything was quiet outside our burrow; the birds must have flown far away and the animals gone safely to ground; even the usually ever-screeching tree cicadas were silent.
The first shock was sharp but also soundless. I heard Zyanya whisper fearfully, 'Zyuuu,' and I clasped her protectively tight against me. Then we heard a long, low, rumbling growl from somewhere far inland. One of the volcanoes in that range was belching, if not erupting, and violently enough to quake the earth as far as the coast.
The second and third shocks, and I do not know how many more, came with such increasing rapidity that they all blended into a dizzying motion of simultaneous rocking, tilting, and bucking. The girl and I might have been wedged inside a hollow log careering down a Whitewater river. The noise was so deafeningly loud and prolonged that we might equally have been inside one of the drums which tear out the heart, it being beaten by a demented priest. The noise was of our mountain falling to pieces, contributing more of itself to that rubble of immense
