THE “that” which Fray José gave me to serve as an open sesame to the Mayan priest was a strange combination of the old and the new, of the pagan and the Christian. Upon a sheet of paper bearing the figure of the Cross, he had written a message in hieroglyphic symbols, and accompanying this, was a tiny bag of painted hide containing a medal of St. Christopher and a tiny golden image of a Mayan deity. Good Fray José was no narrow-minded bigot but was willing to recognize conditions as they were and to make necessary concessions to the occasions that arose. If the Indians were willing to please him by assuming the veneer of Christianity, he was quite willing to reciprocate by pleasing the Indians to the extent of employing pagan symbols and following pagan customs, though he had no more faith in them than the Indians had in his Church and its rites. It is needless to describe the details of my trip to Totil or to narrate my experiences while I remained in the isolated little Indian village, studying the ancient Zutugil language under the tutelage of the painstaking patient Pedro, a dignified-looking Indian, who, being in charge of Fray José’s most outlying chapel, regarded himself as a dignitary of the Church of Rome and the most important and exalted personage in the district. But, being Indian, he was Indian to the core, and I was both interested and amused to discover that he had painted the images of all the saints a mahogany brown, and had painted the figure of Christ upon the crucifix inky-black. “It is that the people may regard them with greater reverence,” he explained when I asked him about it. “How can one expect an Indian to adore the white Santos when they have received nothing but harm from those of white skin?” he asked. “And,” he added, “how can the white Santos or the white Cristo know what is good for the brown Indians?” Then, a bit hesitantly and shamefacedly, “and besides, the great God of our ancestors was black and with a black Cristo before them they feel that they are worshipping Ekah and are more devout. Does the Señor think I have done wrong?” I assured him I did not. If, by painting the images, he won more converts or added to the sincerity of their devotions, I considered the means were justified by the end. But I felt quite sure that Pedro himself preferred a black Saviour and brown saints to those with white skins, for which I could not blame him much either. But regardless of his religious idiosyncracies, Pedro was an excellent teacher of his native tongue, and at the end of six weeks in his village, he assured me that I had mastered enough of the Zutugil language to continue on my journey; although, he added: “No white man can learn the tongue of my people. Even Fray José speaks it always with the tongue of the white man.” Accompanied by four Indians who acted as guides, porters and camp-boys, I started on what I believed at the time to be the last lap of my journey.