meaning; but even he closed his eyes for a moment in horror. The poor
creatures behind mumbled and crossed themselves and clung to each other.
The plain was a vast charnel-house. The sun, looking over the brow of an
eastern hill, threw its pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons,
bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and gone generations of
carrion, white, rigid, sinister. Detached skulls lay in heaps, grinning
derisively. Stark digits pointed threateningly, as if the old warriors
still guarded their domain. Other frames lay face downward, as though
the broken teeth had bitten the dust in battle. Slender forms lay prone,
their arms encircling cooking utensils, beautiful in form and colour.
Great bowls and urns, toy canoes, mortars and pestles, of serpentine,
sandstone, and steatite, wrought with a lost art,--if, indeed, the art
had ever been known beyond this island,--and baked to richest dyes, were
placed at the head and feet of skeletons more lofty in stature than
their fellows.

Father Carillo sprinkled holy water right and left, bidding his Indians
chant a rosary for the souls which once had inhabited these appalling
tenements. The Indians obeyed with clattering teeth, keeping their eyes
fixed stonily upon the ground lest they stumble and fall amid yawning
ribs.

The ghastly tramp lasted two hours. The sun spurned the hill-top and
cast a flood of light upon the ugly scene. The white bones grew whiter,
dazzling the eyes of the living. They reached the foot of a mountain and
began a toilsome ascent through a dark forest. Here new terrors awaited
them. Skeletons sat propped against trees, grinning out of the dusk,
gleaming in horrid relief against the mass of shadow. Father Carillo,
with one eye over his shoulder, managed by dint of command, threats, and
soothing words to get his little band to the top of the hill. Once,