and yet found no breach of harmony if those singing
notes were pierced through with the shrieks of the tortured dying.
Just opposite the most enchanting spot in these underground groves of
pleasure was a great pyramidal heap of human skulls, thousands of them.

"The builders," explained Zoraida calmly. "Those who obeyed the
commands of the Tezcucan king, who made his dream a reality, who were
in the end sacrificed here. Five priests, alternating with another
five, were unremitting night and day until at last the great sacrifice
was complete. The records are there," and she pointed to a remote
corner of the garden where vaguely through the greenery he made out
stone columns; "I have seen them and I have made my own tally. Not
less than ten thousand captives expired here." It struck Kendric that
there was a note of pride in her tone. "Look; yonder is the great
stone of sacrifice."

He drew closer, at once repelled and fascinated. A few yards from the
base of the heap of skulls was a great block of jasper, polished and of
a smoothness like glass. Upon this one after another of ten thousand
human beings, strong struggling men and perhaps women and children had
lain, while priests as terrible as vultures held them, while one priest
of high skill and infinite cruelty drove his knife and made his gash
and withdrew the anguished beating heart to hold it high above his
head. Again Zoraida pointed; on the stone lay the ancient knife, a
blade of "itztli," obsidian, dark, translucent, as hard as flint, a
product of volcanic fires.

Kendric turned from stone and knife and human relics and looked with
strange new wonder at Zoraida. She claimed kin with the royalty of
this ancient order; perhaps her claim was just. He had wondered if she
were mad; was not his answer now given him? Was she not after all that
not uncommon thing called a throw-back, a reversion to an ancestral
type? If in fact there flowed in her veins the blood of that princess
of the golden king of Tezcuco who could have smiled at the whisperings
of her lord and the tender cadences of music floating through the
gardens his love had made for her, while just here his priests made
their sacrifices and she, turning her eyes from his ardent ones, now
and then languorously watched--was Zoraida mad or was she simply
ancient Aztec or Toltec or Tezcucan, born four or five hundred years
after her time? Her slow smile now as she watched him and no doubt
read at