STRANGE WORLD

As though voicing her thoughts to herself—"But it is why the Messengers did not see them that I

cannot understand . . . the Mother must know of this. . . . I must go quickly to the

Mother. . . ."

"The Mother?" asked Graydon.

"The Snake Mother!" her gaze returned to him; she touched a bracelet on her right wrist.

Graydon, drawing close, saw that this bracelet held a disk on which was carved in bas-relief a

serpent with a woman's head and woman's breast and arms. It lay coiled upon what appeared

to be a great bowl held high on the paws of four beasts. The shapes of these creatures did not

at once register upon his consciousness, so absorbed was he in his study of that coiled figure.

He stared close—and closer. And now he realized that the head reared upon the coils was not

really that of a woman. No! It was reptilian.

Snake-like—yet so strongly had the artist feminized it, so great was the suggestion of

womanhood modeled into every line of it, that constantly one saw it as woman, forgetting all

that was of the serpent.

The eyes were of some intensely glittering purple stone. Graydon felt that those eyes were

alive—that far, far away some living thing was looking at him through them. That they were,

in fact, prolongations of some one's—some thing's—vision.

The girl touched one of the beasts that held up the bowl.

"The Xin," she said.

Graydon's bewilderment increased. He knew what those animals were. Knowing, he also

knew that he looked upon the incredible.

They were dinosaurs! The monstrous saurian that ruled earth millions upon millions of years

ago, and, but for whose extinction, so he had been taught, man could never have developed.

Who in this Andean wilderness could know or could have known the dinosaurs? Who here

could have carved the monsters with such life-like detail as these possessed? Why, it was

only yesterday that science had learned what really were their huge bones, buried so long that

the rocks had molded themselves around them in adamantine matrix. And laboriously, with

every modern resource, haltingly and laboriously, science had set those bones together as a

perplexed child would a picture puzzle, and put forth what it believed to be reconstructions of

these long-vanished chimera of earth's nightmare youth.

Yet here, far from all science it must surely be, some one had modeled those same monsters

of a woman's bracelet. Why then—it followed that whoever had done this must have had

before him the living forms from which to work. Or, if not, had copies of those forms set

down by ancient men who had seen them.

And either or both of these things were incredible.

Who were the people to whom she belonged? There had been a name—Yu-Atlanchi.

"Sierra," he said, "where is Yu-Atlanchi? Is it this place?"

"This?" She laughed. "No! Yu-Atlanchi is the Ancient Land. The Hidden Land where the six

Lords and the Lords of Lords once ruled. And where now rules only the Snake Mother and—

another. This place Yu-Atlanchi!" Again she laughed. "Now and then I hunt here with—

the—" she hesitated, looking at him oddly—"So it was that he who lies there caught me. I was hunting. I had slipped away from my followers, for sometimes it pleases me to hunt alone. I came through these trees and saw your tetuane, your lodge. I came face to face with—him.