d up,
When eyes shall be closed in death,
Eat--eat while there is bread,
Drink--drink of warrior wine!_"[A]

[A] Book of Chilan Balam.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE BATTLE ON THE MESA

The stars had marked the middle of the night, and the Castilian camp
slept, save for the guards who paced quietly through the pine groves,
and the Te-hua sentinels on the summit above, who rested in silence at
the places where footholds carved by pre-historic Lost Others in the
face of the rock wall, afforded a trail for the enemy if the enemy
could find it.

Between the Castilians in the pine below, and the Te-hua sentinels on
the rock mesa of the ruins above, there stretched the line of cave
dwellings high in the rock wall. These needed no guard--for there the
Te-hua warriors slept, and Tahn-te read the fate of things in the
crystal, and made prayers.

But to the east where he had forbidden wandering feet, a man and woman
did crouch in a crevice, and watch while the shining ones overhead
travelled to the center of the sky and then towards the mountains in
the trail of the sun.

For Tahn-te they watched--and the watching was so long that the man
slept at intervals in the arms of the woman--but the woman did not
sleep! Victory was too near--and triumph beat in her blood, and like a
panther of the hills waiting for prey did she listen for the steps of
the man who had known her humiliation.

But when the steps did come, they came not from the Po-Ahtun-ho, nor
were they the steps of a man.

A woman crept lightly as a mountain squirrel from one to another of
the boulders on the eastern hill, and at last climbed to the dwellings
of the Ancient Ones, and reached the portal of the sacred place of the
star.

This was the place where the wise men of old watched the coming of the
gods as they gazed upon earth through the mask of the glimmering
stars. It was not a place for women, for no woman had been Reader of
the Stars within known records of the Te-hua people. Yet it surely was
a woman who crept upwards in the night to the place where women feared
to go.

Yahn Tsyn-deh slipped like a snake from the crevice and watched from
the shadow of a rock, and was richly repaid. It was the Woman of the
Twilight who came to the place where Tahn-te had forbidden the
Castilians and warriors to walk, and against the sky Yahn could see
the outline of a water jar borne on her back by the head-band of wove