As we neared the building, a man stepped from the doorway, and instantly my Indians halted, stooped, and gathering handfuls of dust from the roadway, scattered it on their heads. That gesture of humbling themselves was enough to identify the man in the doorway as the high-priest of their ancient faith. I gazed at him with intense interest. He was very old. His hair was white, his brown face seamed, wrinkled, and creased until it resembled a withered, shrivelled sapodillo.[2] His cheek-bones seemed about to break through the tightly-drawn skin; his eyes were so sunken that they appeared mere pin points of light in the depths of the sockets, and between his eagle-beak nose and his sharp, bony chin his thin lips were like a gash among cavernous wrinkles. In his ears he wore huge plugs of carved jade; about his scrawny, turtle-like neck was a necklace of huge turquoises, garnets and crystal from which depended a gold disk representing the sun. About his head was a band of cotton woven in an elaborate geometrical pattern of red, white and green, and with two long tail feathers of the _Quetzal_ rising above his forehead. He was dressed in a single loose robe of black cotton ornamented with intricate designs in the sacred red, white and green of the ancient Mayas, and he leaned upon a polished staff of black wood elaborately carved and with the upper portion covered with turquoise mosaic work. [2] A tropical tree bearing an edible fruit; its sap yields edible gum, now in demand for making chewing gum. * * * * * FOR a moment he peered at me in silence, and a frown deepened the wrinkles on his forehead. I stepped forward, greeted him in Zutugil, and handed him the letter and the little skin bag I had received from Fray José. Instantly, as his claw-like hand grasped the token, his manner changed. The frown vanished, he nodded his head, and he welcomed me to his village. Such was my meeting with Katchilcan, high-priest of Tohil the Rumbler-god of the Kitche Maya, descendant of the royal line of the Great Snake of Mayapan. Fray José had spoken truly when he had said he would help me to step into the past, for Katchilcan was the past personified. But though he was of the past, yet he was thoroughly aware of the present. How old he was no one--not even he--could say, and undoubtedly he exaggerated his age, when he declared that his parents had been killed by the soldiers of Tonatiuh (Alvarado) and that he could remember the Padre Landa. Yet who can say? Who can declare positively that an Indian may not live for three centuries or more? Be that as it may, the priest was very, very old--a centenarian beyond question--with all the wisdom of his years, a keen, alert brain, and steeped in the lore, the involved mythology, the legends, the customs and the history of his people.