Your Excellency wishes me to have done with this subject. Ah, well, no doubt I dwell on it only because it is my theory. I have always been fond of it, and of testing it, and I never once encountered disproof. I still think the correlation of a woman's sexuality and her areola ought to have some useful application outside the bedchamber.

Yyo ayyo! Do you know, Your Excellency, it suddenly occurs to me that your Church might be interested. It could use my theory as a quick and simple test for choosing those girls best suited by nature to be nuns in your—

I desist, yes, my lord.

I will just mention that, when Tzitzi and I at last returned to the house, fairly staggering with the four heavy jugs of water, we were berated by our mother for having been so long out in the open on such a day. My sister, who only a short while before had been a young wild animal—thrashing, panting, and clawing me in her ecstasy—now lied as casually and smoothly as any priest:

"You cannot scold us for loitering or dallying. There were others wanting water from the spring. Since the day forbids any congregating, Mixtli and I had to wait our turn at a distance and move nearer bit by bit. We did not waste any time."

At the end of the dreary hollow days, all The One World breathed a great sigh of relief. I do not know exactly what you mean, Your Excellency, when you mutter about "a parody of Lent," but on the first day of the month The Tree Is Raised there commenced a round of general gaiety. Throughout the following days, there were private celebrations in the bigger homes of nobles and well-to-do commoners, and in the local temples of the various villages, during which the hosts and guests, the priests and worshipers indulged in excesses of which they had been deprived during the nemontemtin.

Those preliminary festivities might have been a trifle dampened that year, for we got word of the death of our Uey-Tlatoani Tixoc. But his reign had been the shortest in the history of Mexíca rulers, and the least noteworthy. Indeed, it was rumored that he had been quietly poisoned—either by the elders of his Speaking Council, impatient with Tixoc's uninterest in mounting new war campaigns, or by his brother Ahuítzotl, Water Monster, next in line to the throne and ambitious to show how much more brilliantly he could rule. At any rate, Tixoc had been such a colorless figure that he was not much missed or mourned. So our grand ceremony in praise and supplication of the rain god Tlaloc, held in Xaltócan's central pyramid plaza, was also dedicated to celebrating the accession of the new Revered Speaker Ahuítzotl.

The rites did not begin until Tonatíu had sunk to sleep in his western bed, lest that god of warmth should see and be jealous of the honors paid to his brother god of wetness. Then there began to gather—about the edges of the open plaza and on the slopes rising around it—every single inhabitant of the island, save those too old, too young, too ill or disabled, and those who had to remain at home to tend them. As soon as the sun set, the square and the pyramid and the temple on top were aflutter with the black-robed priests, busy at their last preparations of lighting the multitude of torches, the artificially colored urn fires, and the sweetly smoking incense burners. The sacrificial stone atop the pyramid would not be used that night. Instead, there had been brought—to the foot of the pyramid, where every spectator could see into it—an immense, hollowed-out stone tub, full of water previously sanctified by special incantations.

As the darkness deepened, the grove of trees beside and behind the pyramid also came alight: innumerable little wick lamps flickering as if the trees were nesting all the fireflies in the world. The trees' branches began to sway, swarming with children: very young and small but agile boys and girls wearing costumes lovingly fashioned by their mothers. Some of the little girls were enveloped by stiff paper globes painted to represent various fruits; others wore ruffs or skirts of paper cut and painted to represent various flowers. The boys were even more gaudily dressed, some covered in glued-on feathers to act the role of birds, others wearing translucent oiled-paper wings to play the part of bees and butterflies. All during the night's events, the boy birds and boy insects flitted acrobatically from branch to branch, pretending to "sip the nectar" of the girl fruits and girl flowers.

When the night was entirely upon us, and the island's population was assembled, the chief priest of Tlaloc appeared on the pyramid summit. He blew a blast on his conch trumpet, then raised his arms commandingly, and the hubbub of crowd noise began to subside. He held his arms aloft until the plaza hushed to absolute silence. Then he dropped his arms and, on the instant, Tlaloc himself spoke in a deafening crash of thunder—ba-ra-ROOM!—that kept on resounding and reverberating. The noise veritably shook the leaves on the trees, the smoke of the incense, the flames of the fires, the breath we had gasped into our lungs. It was not really Tlaloc, of course, but the mighty "thunder drum," also called "the drum that tears out the heart." Its taut and heavy snakeskin drumhead was being frenziedly hammered with óli mallets. The sound of the thunder drum can be heard two one-long-runs distant, so you can imagine its effect on us people clustered close around it.

That fearsome throbbing continued until we felt that our flesh must be about to shiver off our bones. Then it gradually diminished, quieter and quieter yet, until it merged into the pulsing of the smaller "god drum," which merely muttered while the chief priest chanted the standard greeting and invocation to Tlaloc. At intervals he paused for the crowd of us to respond in chorus—as your churchgoers say "Amen"—with a long-drawn owl cry of "Hoo-oo-ooo...." At other intervals he paused while his lesser priests stepped forward, reached into their robes, plucked out small water creatures—a frog, an axolotl salamander, a snake—held them up wriggling and then swallowed them whole and alive.

The chief priest concluded his opening chant with the age-old words, as loudly as he could shout them: "Tehuan tiezquiaya in ahuehuetl, in pochotl, TLALOCTZIN!"—which means, "We would that we be beneath the cypress, beneath the ceiba tree, Lord Tlaloc!"—which is to say, "We would ask your protection, your dominion over us." And at that bellow, priests in every part of the plaza threw onto the urn fires clouds of finely powdered maize flour, which exploded with a sharp crack and a dazzling flash, as if a fork of lightning had stabbed down among us. Then ba-ra-ROOM! the thunder drum smote us again, and kept on pounding until our teeth seemed to be rattling loose in our jaws.

But again it slowly quieted, and, when our ears could hear, we were listening to music played on the clay flute shaped like a sweet potato; and on "the suspended gourds" of different sizes which give different noises when struck with sticks; and on the flute made of five reeds of different lengths fastened side by side; while, behind all of those, the rhythm was kept by "the strong bone," a deer's toothed jawbone rasped with a rod. With the music came the dancers, men and women in concentric circles doing the Reed Dance. At their ankles, knees, and elbows were fastened dried pods of seeds, which rattled, whispered, and rustled as they moved. The men, wearing costumes of water blue, each carried a length of reed about as thick as his wrist and as long as his arm. The women were dressed in blouses and skirts colored the pale green of young reeds, and Tzitzitlini was their leader.

The male and female dancers glided through graceful interweavings in time to the happy music. The women waved their arms sinuously above their heads, and you could see the waving of reeds in a breeze. The men shook those thick canes they carried, and you could hear the dry rustling of reeds in a breeze. Then the music soared louder, and the women grouped in the center of the plaza, dancing in place, while the men formed a ring around them, and made a casting gesture with their thick reeds. At which, each of the things was revealed to be not just a single reed but a whole series of them, the thick one enclosing a less thick, which in turn enclosed a thinner, and so on.