Aztec

When the boatman and I were out from the shore again, even a landsman like myself could see that any landing on the seaward slope of the mountain was impossible. Its rubble of boulders, many of them as big as the smaller palaces of Tenochtítlan, extended forbiddingly far about it. The ocean broke among those rocks into vertical cliffs and towers and columns of white water. Those lifted incredibly high, and hung there poised, and then tumbled down with a roar like all the thunders of Tlaloc booming at once, and then slithered to sea again, making whirlpools that gulped and sucked so powerfully that even a few of the house-sized boulders could be seen to shake.

The ocean's turmoil extended so far that it took all the boatman's skill to bring us safely to the beach just east of the mountain. But he did it, and, when we had dragged the dugout up the sand out of reach of the tumultuous surf, when we had finished coughing and spitting out the salt water we had swallowed, I sincerely congratulated him:

"If you can so bravely best that vicious sea, you have little to fear from any of these contemptible Zyu."

That seemed to embolden him to some degree, so I gave him my spear to carry and motioned for him to follow me. We strode along the beach to the mountain wall and found a slope we could climb. That brought us to the ridge of the mountain about halfway between sea level and its summit, and from the ridge we could see uninterrupted beach continue on the westward side. But we turned left along the ridge until we stood on the promontory above that spreading fringe of great rocks and the fury of great waters. I was at the place of which Zyanya's father had spoken, but it seemed an unlikely place to find a precious purple dye—or fragile snails, for that matter.

What I did find was a group of five men climbing the ridge toward us from the direction of the ocean. They were obviously Zyu priests, for they were as unwashed, tangle-haired, and slovenly as any Mexíca priests, with the added inelegance that they wore not ragged robes but ragged animal skins, whose rancid smell reached us before the men did. They all five looked unfriendly, and when the foremost barked something in his native language, it sounded unfriendly.

"Tell them and tell them quickly," I said to my boatman, "that I come offering gold to buy some of their purple dye."

Before he could speak, one of the men grunted, "No need him. I talk enough Lóochi. I priest of Tiat Ndik, Sea God, and this his place. You die for put foot here."

I tried to convey, in the simplest Lóochi words, that I would not have intruded on holy terrain if I could have made my proposal in any other place or ma

"You go away now, Yellow Eye, maybe you go alive."

I tried to suggest that, since I had already profaned those holy precincts, it would take only a little longer for us to exchange my gold for his purple.

He said, "Purple holy for Sea God. No price can buy." And he repeated, "You go away now, maybe you go alive."

"Very well. But before I go, would you at least satisfy my curiosity? What do snails have to do with the purple dye?"

"Chachi?" He echoed the Lóochi word for snails, uncomprehending, and turned for interpretation to my boatman, who was perceptibly quaking with fright.

"Ah, the ndik diok," said the priest, enlightened. He hesitated, then turned and beckoned for me to follow. The boatman and the other four Zyu stayed atop the ridge while the chief priest and I clambered down toward the sea. It was a long descent, and the thundering walls and spouts of white water broke higher and higher around us, and showered a drizzle of cold spume down upon us. But we came at last into a sheltered depression among the massive boulders, and in it was a pool where the water merely sloshed back and forth, while the rest of the ocean boomed and pounded outside.

"Holy place of Tiat Ndik," said the priest. "Where the god lets us hear his voice."

"His voice?" I said. "You mean the ocean's noise?"

"His voice!" the man insisted. "To hear, must put head under."

Not taking my eyes off him and keeping my maquahuitl at the ready, I knelt and lowered my head until I had one ear under the sloshing water. At first I could hear my own heart making a pulse beat in my ear, and that is an eerie sound, but then there came a much stranger one, begi

Meanwhile, he was moving around the pool and studying it from various points, and finally he bent to plunge his arm in to the shoulder. He worked for a moment, then brought up his hand and opened it for me to see, saying "Ndik diok." I daresay the creature is some relation to the familiar land snail, but Zyanya's father had been mistaken to promise her a necklace of polished shells. The slimy slug carried no shell on its back, and had no other distinction that I could see.

But then the priest bent his head close to the slug in his palm and blew hard upon it. That evidently a

Gri

The men of the Zyu collected the snails and provoked their exudations only twice a year, on holy days selected by some complicated divination. Though there were thousands of the sea snails clinging among the rocks, each gave only a minute quantity of that substance. So the men had to go far out among those cataclysms of crashing water, and dive into them, to pry the slugs loose, make them excrete onto a hank of cotton thread or into a leather flask, then replace the creatures unharmed. The snails had to be kept alive for the next time of extraction, but the men were not so indispensable; in each of those half-yearly rituals, some four or five divers were drowned or dashed to death upon the rocks.

"But why go to all that trouble, and sacrifice so many of your people, and then refuse to profit from it?" I asked, and managed to make the priest understand. He beckoned again, and led me farther into a clammy grotto, and said proudly:

"Our Sea God whose voice you heard. Tiat Ndik."