My voice that mocks
The rattle that falling bones will make
On barren rocks.

My banded skin is the voice of the Priest--
I am the Drum!
I sound the call to the War-God's feast
Till Tezcatlipoca's power hath ceased
And the White Gods come
Out of the fire of the burning East--
Hear me, the Drum!

X

THE GODS OF TAXMAR

If the Fathers of the Church had ever been on the other side of the
world, they would have made new rules for it.

So thought Jeronimo Aguilar, on board a caravel plying between Darien
and Hispaniola. It was a thought he would hardly have dared think in
Spain.

He was a dark thin young friar from the mountains near Seville. In 1488
his mother, waiting, as women must, for news from the wars, vowed that
if God and the Most Catholic Sovereigns drove out the Moors and sent her
husband home to her, she would give her infant son to the Church. That
was twenty-four years ago, and never had the power of the Church been so
great as it now was. When the young Fray Jeronimo had been moved by
fiery missionary preaching to give himself to the work among the
Indians, his mother wept with astonishment and pride.

But the Indies he found were not the Indies he had heard of. Men who
sailed from Cadiz valiant if rough and hard-bitted soldiers of the
Cross, turned into cruel adventurers greedy for gold, hard masters
abusing their power. The innocent wild people of Colon's island Eden
were charged by the planters with treachery, theft, murderous
conspiracy, and utter laziness. With a little bitter smile Aguilar
remembered how the hidalgo, who would not dig to save his life, railed
at the Indian who died of the work he had never learned to do. It was
not for a priest to oppose the policy of the Church and the Crown, and
very few priests attempted it, whatever cruelty they might see. Aguilar
half imagined that the demon gods of the heathen were battling against
the invading apostles of the Cross, poisoning their hearts and defeating
their aims. It was all like an evil enchantment.

These meditations were ended by a mighty buffet of wind that smote the
caravel and sent it flying northwest. Ourakan was abroad, the Carib god
of the hurricane, and no one could think of anything thereafter but the
heaving, tumbling wilderness of black waves and howling tempest and
hissing spray. Valdivia, regidor of Darien, had been sent to Hispaniola
by Balboa, the governor, with imp