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.

Even now the burden of that chant with the vision of those who sang it
sometimes haunts my sleep at night, but I will not write it here. Let
him who reads imagine all that is most cruel in the heart of man, and
every terror of the evillest dream, adding to these some horror-ridden
tale of murder, ghosts, and inhuman vengeance; then, if he can, let him
shape the whole in words and, as in a glass darkly, perchance he may
mirror the spirit of that last ancient song of the women of the Otomie,
with its sobs, its cries of triumph, and its death wailings.

Ever as they sang, step by step they drew backwards, and with them went
the leaders of each company, their eyes fixed upon the statues of their
gods. Now they were but a segment of a circle, for they did not advance
towards the temple; backward and outward they went with a slow and
solemn tramp. There was but one line of them now, for those in the
second ring filled the gaps in the first as it widened; still they drew
on till at length they stood on the sheer edge of the platform. Then
the priests and the women leaders took their place among them and for a
moment there was sil