“Never heard of him. But this is certainly some fine collection of Maya echoes. They chose the region wisely for a hiding place. Undoubtedly it was always sacred, even before the Spaniards came. The old priests knew the natural causes of the mysteries, and passed them over to the herd as mystery with a capital ‘M’ and supernatural in origin.” Not many minutes afterward they emerged on an open, level space, close under a crannied and ledge-ribbed cliff, and exchanged their single-file mode of progression to three-abreast. The ground was a hard, brittle crust of surface, so crystalline and dry as never to suggest that it was aught else but crystalline and dry all the way down. In an ebullition of spirits, desiring to keep both men on an equality of favor, Leoncia seized their hands and started them into a run. At the end of half a dozen strides the disaster happened. Simultaneously Henry and Francis broke through the crust, sinking to their thighs, and Leoncia was only a second behind them in breaking through and sinking almost as deep. “Hell’s bells!” Henry muttered. “It’s the very devil’s own landscape.” And his low-spoken words were whispered back to him from the nearby cliffs on all sides and endlessly and sibilantly repeated. Not at first did they fully apprehend their danger. It was when, by their struggles, they found themselves waist-deep and steadily sinking, that the two men grasped the gravity of the situation. Leoncia still laughed at the predicament, for it seemed no more than that to her. “Quicksand,” Francis gasped. “Quicksand!” all the landscape gasped back at him, and continued to gasp it in fading ghostly whispers, repeating it and gossiping about it with gleeful unction. “It’s a pot-hole filled with quicksand,” Henry corroborated. “Maybe the old boy was right in sticking back there on the barking sands,” observed Francis. The ghostly whispering redoubled upon itself and was a long time in dying away. By this time they were midway between waist and arm-pits and sinking as methodically as ever. “Well, somebody’s got to get out of the scrape alive,” Henry remarked. And, even without discussing the choice, both men began to hoist Leoncia up, although the effort and her weight thrust them more quickly down. When she stood, free and clear, a foot on the nearest shoulder of each of the two men she loved, Francis said, though the landscape mocked him: “Now, Leoncia, we’re going to toss you out of this. At the word ‘Go!’ let yourself go. And you must strike full length and softly on the crust. You’ll slide a little. But don’t let yourself stop. Keep on going. Crawl out to the solid land on your hands and knees. And, whatever you do, don’t stand up until you reach the solid land.—Ready, Henry?” Between them, though it hastened their sinking, they swung her back and forth, free in the air, and, the third swing, at Francis’ “Go!” heaved her shoreward.