Yes, I finally met some people, though not until I had been among the mountains for many days, by which time I was wondering if The One World had been totally depopulated by Tzeboruko's eruption or some other disaster while I was away at sea.
Very peculiar people they were, too, those people I met. They were called Rarámuri—I assume they still are—a word that means Fast of Feet, and with good reason, as I shall tell. I encountered the first of them when I was standing on a clifftop, resting from a breathtaking climb and admiring a breathtaking view. I was looking down into an awesomely deep chasm, its sheer sides feathered with trees. Through its bottom ran a river, and that river was fed by a waterfall that hurtled from a notched mountaintop on the other side of the canyon from where I stood. The fall must have been almost half of one-long-run—straight down—a mighty column of white water at the top, a mighty plume of white mist at the bottom. I was looking at that spectacle when I heard a haiclass="underline"
"Kuira-ba!"
I started, because it was the first human voice I had heard in so long, but it sounded cheerful enough, so I took the word to be a greeting. It was a young man who had shouted, and he smiled as he came along the cliff edge toward me. He was handsome of face, in the way that a hawk is handsome, and he was well built, though shorter than myself. He was decently clad, except that he was barefoot—but so was I by that time, my sandals having long ago shredded away. Besides his clean deerskin loincloth, he wore a gaily painted deerskin mantle, of a style new to me; it had wrist-length sleeves set into it, for extra warmth.
As he came up to me, I returned his salute of "Kuira-ba." He indicated the cataract I had been admiring, and grinned as proudly as if he owned it, and said, "Basa-seachic," which I took to mean Falling Water, since a waterfall was unlikely to be named anything else. I repeated the word, and said it with feeling, to convey that I thought the water a most marvelous water, falling most impressively. The young man pointed to himself and said, "Tes-disora," obviously his name—and meaning Maize Stalk, I later learned. I pointed to myself, said "Mixtli," and pointed to a cloud in the sky. He nodded, tapped his mantled chest, and said, "Rarámurime," then indicated me and said, "Chichimecame."
I shook my head emphatically, slapped my bare chest and said, "Mexícatl!" at which he only nodded again, indulgently, as if I had specified one of the numberless tribes of the Chichimóca dog people. Not then, but eventually, I realized that the Rarámuri had never even heard of us Mexíca—of our civilized society, Our knowledge and power and far-flung dominions—and I think they would have cared little if they had heard. The Rarámuri have a comfortable life in their mountain fastnesses—well fed and watered, content with their own company—so they seldom travel far. Hence they know no other peoples except their near neighbors, of whom the occasional raider or forager or simple wanderer happens into their country, as I had done.
To the north of their territory live the dread Yaki, and no sane people desire close acquaintance with them. I remembered having heard of the Yaki from that scalpless elder pochtéatl. Tes-disora, when later I was able to understand his language, told me more: "The Yaki are wilder than the wildest beasts. For loincloths, they wear the hair of other men. They tear the scalp from a man while he yet lives, before they butcher and dismember and devour him. If they kill him first, you see, they count his hair not worth keeping and wearing. And the hair of a woman counts not at all. Any women they catch are only good for eating—after they have been raped until they split up the middle and are of no more use for raping."
In the mountains south of the Rarámuri live more peaceable tribes, related to them by fairly similar languages and customs. Along the western seacoast live tribes of fishermen, who almost never venture inland. All of those peoples are, if not what could be called civilized, at least cleanly of body and tidy of dress. The only really slovenly and squalid neighbors of the Rarámuri are the Chichimeca tribes in the deserts to the east.
I was as sunburned as any desert-dwelling Chichimecatl, and was as nearly naked. In Rarámuri eyes, I could only be one of that trash breed, though perhaps an unusually enterprising one, to have toiled my way to the mountain heights. I do think that Tes-disora might at least have taken notice, at our first meeting, of the fact that I did not stink. Thanks to the mountains' abundance of water, I had been able to bathe every day, and, like the Rarámuri, I continued to do so. But, despite my evident gentility, despite my insistence that I was of the Mexíca, despite my reiterated glorification of that far-off nation, I never persuaded one single person of the Rarámuri that I was not just a "Chichimecame" fugitive from the desert.
No matter. Whatever they believed me to be, or whatever they thought I was pretending to be, the Rarámuri made me welcome. And I lingered among them for a time, simply because I was intrigued by their way of life and enjoyed sharing it. I stayed with them long enough to learn their language sufficiently to be able to converse, at least with the help of many gestures on my part and theirs. Of course, during my first encounter with Tes-disora, all our communication was done by gestures.
After we had exchanged names, he used his hands to indicate a shelter over his head—meaning a village, I assumed—and said, "Guaguey-bo," and pointed southward. Then he indicated Tonatíu in the sky, calling him "Tatevari," or Grandfather Fire, and made me understand that we could reach the village of Guaguey-bo in a journey of three suns. I made gestures and faces of gratitude for the invitation, and we went in that direction. To my surprise, Tes-disora set off at a lope, but, when he saw that I was winded and tired and disinclined to run, he dropped back and thereafter matched my walking pace. His lope was evidently his accustomed way of crossing mountains and canyons alike, for, even though I am long-legged, at a walk it took us five days, not three, to reach Guaguey-bo.
Early in the march, Tes-disora gave me to understand that he was one of his village's hunters. I gestured to ask why, then, he was empty-handed. Where had he left his weapons? He grinned and motioned for me to stop walking, to crouch quietly in the underbrush. We waited there in the forest for only a little while, then Tes-disora nudged me and pointed, and I dimly saw a dappled shape move among the trees. Before I could raise my crystal, Tes-disora suddenly sprang from his crouch and away, as if he had been an arrow I had shot from a bow.
The wood was so dense that, even with my seeing topaz, I could not follow every movement of the "hunt," but I saw enough to make me gape in disbelief. The dappled form was that of a young doe, and she had leapt to flee in almost the same instant Tes-disora leapt in pursuit of her. She ran fast, but the young man ran faster. She bounded and twisted this way and that, but he seemed somehow to anticipate her every desperate turn. In less time than I have been telling of it, he closed with the doe, flung himself upon her, and with his hands broke her neck.
As we made a meal of one of the animal's haunches, I made gestures of amazement at Tes-disora's speed and agility. He made gestures of modest dismissal, informing me that he was among the least of the Fast of Feet, that other hunters were far superior at running, and that in any case a mere doe was no challenge compared to a full-grown buck deer. Then, in his turn, he gestured amazement at the burning crystal with which I had lighted our cooking fire. He conveyed that he had never seen such a wondrously useful instrument in the possession of any other barbarian.