It seemed hours before she reached the altar steps. Ramón still stood below the great Quetzalcoatl image with arm up-flung.
Carlota crouched black at the altar steps and flung up the white hands and her white face in the frenzy of the old way.
‘Lord! Lord!’ she cried, in a strange ecstatic voice that froze Kate’s bowels with horror: ‘Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!’
Carlota strangled in her ecstasy. And all the while, Ramón, the living Quetzalcoatl, stood before the flickering altar with naked arm upraised, looking with dark, inalterable eyes down upon the woman.
Throes and convulsions tortured the body of Carlota. She gazed sightlessly upwards. Then came her voice, in the mysterious rhapsody of prayer:
‘Lord! Lord! Forgive!
‘God of love, forgive! He knows not what he does.
