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Updated: June 8, 2025
Soa's hair was singed and cut by the bullet which had shaved her head; the priest's robe hung in charred threads, and his hands were blistered with fire; Juanna's broidered Arab dress, torn by the brutal hand of Pereira, scarcely retained a trace of white, and her long dark locks were tangled and powdered with bits of blackened reed.
"Hold fast," said Leonard through his set teeth, as, disengaging his right hand from about Juanna's waist, he seized the handle of the spear and pressed its broad blade against a knob of rock behind them.
The multitude watched the red bloom as, bruised and broken, through the light and through the shadow, they fell slowly to the seething surface of the pool; then it looked up like one man and saw the white lily set upon Juanna's whiter breast.
As he thought thus, he saw colour creep into Juanna's pale face; then she sighed, opened her eyes, and sat up. "Where am I?" she said, glancing round wildly. "This is not the bed on which I lay down. Oh!" she started, "is it over?" "Hush, dear, hush! I am with you," said Leonard, taking her hand. "So I see. But where are the others, and what is this dreadful place? Are we buried alive, Leonard?
While Leonard and Otter spoke thus in their amazement, had they but known it, a still more interesting conversation was being carried on some three hundred yards away. Its scene was a secret chamber hollowed in the thickness of the temple wall, and the dramatis personae consisted of Nam, the high priest, Soa, Juanna's servant, and Saga, wife of the Snake.
The king dropped his eyes as though he were not willing to contemplate the loveliness which, as he now learned, belonged to the white stranger at Juanna's side. "Have I not said that my power is little, Queen?" he answered somewhat sullenly. "Also, why should I help those who came to this land to trick us, and who have brought the anger of the gods upon its children?"
He obeyed, and while Soa was engaged in clothing Juanna's senseless form in the gown of the priest, Francisco drew his diary from the pocket in his vest where he kept it.
The three priests consulted together, while the chief looked on Juanna's beauty with wondering eyes. Then the oldest of them spoke again: "Thou tellest us in our own tongue of things that have long been hidden, though perchance they are remembered.
Towards evening he returned, reporting that he had seen plenty of buck, but could not get near them, which was just what his master expected. That night they passed hungry, by turns watching Juanna, who was still delirious. At dawn Otter started out again, leaving Leonard, who had been unable to sleep as on the previous night, crouched at Juanna's side, his face buried in his hands.
To Juanna's joy, as they had understood her, so she understood him, for his language was the same that Soa taught her many years before, and in which, for the sake of practice, they had always conversed together for the last two months. "Art thou woman, or spirit?" asked the ancient priest. "I am both woman and spirit," she answered.
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