Page:The plumed serpent - 1926.djvu/267

baskets hanging from the pent roof, swaying as the vessel swayed. Men spread their serapes and curled up to sleep. The light of the lantern lit them up, as they sat and lay, and slept, or talked in murmurs.

A little woman came up out of the darkness; then suddenly ran back again. She had forgotten something. But the vessel would not without her, for the wind would not change yet.

The tall mast stood the great sail in folds along the roof, ready. Under the roof, the lantern swayed, the people slept and stretched. Probably they would not sail till midnight. Then down the lake to Tlapaltepec, with its reeds at the end of the lake, and its dead, dead plaza, its dead dry houses of black adobe, its streets, its strange, buried silence, like Pompeii.

Kate knew it. So strange and deathlike, it and mystified her.

But to-day! To-day she would not loiter by shore all morning. She must go to Jamiltepec in a motor-boat, to see Ramón. To talk to him even about Cipriano.

Ah, how could she marry and give her body to this death? Take the weight of this darkness on her breast, the heaviness of this strange gloom. Die before and pass away whilst still beneath the sun?

Ah no! Better to escape to the white men's lands.

But she went to arrange with for the motorboat.