Perhaps, in fact undoubtedly, any priest or minister of any sect would have been most properly scandalized had he seen and heard me. I fear even good, jolly Padre José would have frowned upon me, for the services I conducted were a most hopeless hodge-podge of the Roman Catholic, the Episcopalian, the Congregational and half a dozen other denominations. From each I selected the most impressive and spectacular features I could remember, and if the good features of each did not bear fruit and win converts to the Christian faith, it was not the fault of my devotions, for I was very much in earnest, very serious and had no thought of sacrilege nor of burlesquing any church. And that the new form of religion appealed to the people was obvious, for the temple of Kukulcan became the favorite, and the attendance at the other temples fell off appreciably. But though this might previously have caused Kinchi Haman to writhe in anger, and to plan most horrible reprisals upon me, I now had little fear of him. In due time, and when Nohul Voh had approved of it, I had, quite as if by accident, managed to let the old rascal catch a glimpse of my chest, and by the manner in which he started and his eyes widened, I knew he had recognized the clan mark of the Tutul Xius, and that no longer did any doubt of my identity exist in his crafty old brain. Much of my time I spent with the old sorcerer. He aroused not only my wonder and my curiosity, but my scientific interests as well, for I very soon discovered that Nohul Voh was a scientist in his way, a sage versed in lore unknown to the rest of the world and possessing secrets of nature that no other man had ever unlocked. If, as he claimed, he was actually centuries old, it is not surprising that he should have acquired vast knowledge, but, strangest of all, was the fact that his knowledge had been developed along entirely untouched and undreamed of lines. I must, however, qualify that statement somewhat. Rather, I should say, along lines that had been lost and forgotten in the dim past, for he assured me that, in the days of his youth, all the wise men or sorcerers of the Mayas had been familiar with principles and forces which he, the last of his clan of the sorcerers’ cult, had perfected and developed. All, according to him, had been able to read the past and the future. And, so he told me, it was largely their reading of the future that had led to the fall of the Mayan Empire and the vanishing of their civilization. Being told that they were destined to be wiped out, that their empire would fall, they had become hopeless, bowed to destiny, and made no effort to struggle against fate. “But how?” I asked him, “could they struggle against fate or the future if the future was to be? If they had struggled, if they had continued, then the reading of the future would have proved false.”