of fishermen holding a conclave in a dug-out hollow by a tree. They saluted, looking at her with black, black eyes. They saluted humbly, and yet in their black eyes was that ancient remote hardness and hauteur.
Cipriano had sent the soldiers for horses. It was too hot to walk.
They sat silent in the invisibility of this end of the lake, the great light taking sight away.
“Why am I not the living Huitzilopochtli?” said Cipriano quietly, looking full at her with his black eyes.
“Do you feel you are?” she said, startled.
“Yes,” he replied, in the same low, secret voice. “It is what I feel.”
The black eyes looked at her with a rather awful challenge. And the small, dark voice seemed to take all her will away. They sat in silence, and she felt she was fainting, losing her consciousness for ever.
The soldiers came, with a black Arab horse for him; a delicate thing; and for her a donkey, on which she could sit sideways. He lifted her into the saddle, where she sat only half-conscious. A soldier led the donkey, and they set off, past the long, frail, hanging fishing nets, that made long filmy festoons, into the lane.
Then out into the sun and the grey-black dust, towards the grey-black, low huts of Jaramay, that lined the wide, desert road.
Jaramay was hot as a lava oven. Black low hut-houses with tiled roofs lined the broken, long, delapidated street. Broken houses. Blazing sun. A brick pavement all smashed and sun-worn. A dog leading a blind man along the little black walls, on the broken pavement. A few goats. And unspeakable lifelessness, emptiness.
They came to the