’This:  I would have you find some three or four men who are not fallen into this madness, and with them aid me to loose the Teules, for we cannot save the others.  If this may be done, surely we can lower them with ropes from that point where the road is broken away, down to the path beneath, and thus they may escape to their own people.’

‘I will try,’ he answered, shrugging his shoulders, ’not from any tenderness towards the accursed Teules, whom I could well bear to see stretched upon the stone, but because it is your wish, and for the sake of the friendship between us.’

Then he went, and presently I saw several men place themselves, as though by chance, between the spot where the last of the line of Indian prisoners, and the first of the Spaniards were made fast, in such a fashion as to hide them from the sight of the maddened women, engrossed as they were in their orgies.

Now I crept up to the Spaniards.  They were squatted upon the ground, bound by their hands and feet to the copper rings in the pavement.  There they sat silently awaiting the dreadful doom, their faces grey with terror, and their eyes starting from their sockets.

‘Hist!’ I whispered in Spanish into the ear of the first, an old man whom I knew as one who had taken part in the wars of Cortes.  ’Would you be saved?’

He looked up quickly, and said in a hoarse voice: 

’Who are you that talk of saving us?  Who can save us from these she devils?’

’I am Teule, a man of white blood and a Christian, and alas that I must say it, the captain of this savage people.  With the aid of some few men who are faithful to me, I purpose to cut your bonds, and afterwards you shall see.  Know, Spaniard, that I do this at great risk, for if we are caught, it is a chance but that I myself shall have to suffer those things from which I hope to rescue you.’

‘Be assured, Teule,’ answered the Spaniard, ’that if we should get safe away, we shall not forget this service.  Save our lives now, and the time may come when we shall pay you back with yours.  But even if we are loosed, how can we cross the open space in this moonlight and escape the eyes of those furies?’

‘We must trust to chance for that,’ I answered, and as I spoke, fortune helped us strangely, for by now the Spaniards in their camp below had perceived what was going forward on the crest of the teocalli.  A yell of horror rose from them and instantly they opened fire upon us with their pieces and arquebusses, though, because of the shape of the pyramid and of their position beneath it, the storm of shot swept over us, doing us little or no hurt.  Also a great company of them poured across the courtyard, hoping to storm the temple, for they did not know that the road had been broken away.