background rose Makiling, imposing and majestic, crowned with fleecy clouds. On the left lay Talim Island with its curious sweep of hills. A fresh breeze rippled over the wide plain of water.
"By the way, captain," said Ben-Zayb, turning around, "do you know in what part of the lake a certain Guevara, Navarra, or Ibarra, was killed?"
The group looked toward the captain, with the exception of Simoun, who had turned away his head as though to look for something on the shore.
"Ah, yes!" exclaimed Doña Victorina. "Where, captain? Did he leave any tracks in the water?"
The good captain winked several times, an indication that he was annoyed, but reading the request in the eyes of all, took a few steps toward the bow and scanned the shore.
"Look over there," he said in a scarcely audible voice, after making sure that no strangers were near. " According to the officer who conducted the pursuit, Ibarra, upon finding himself surrounded, jumped out of his banka there near the Kinabutasan[1] and, swimming under water, covered all that distance of more than two miles, saluted by bullets every time that he raised his head to breathe. Over yonder is where they lost track of him, and a little farther on near the shore they discovered something like the color of blood. And now I think of it, it's just thirteen years, day for day, since this happened."
"So that his corpse—" began Ben-Zayb.
"Went to join his father's," replied Padre Sibyla. "Wasn't he also another filibuster, Padre Salvi?"
"That's what might be called cheap funerals, Padre Camorra, eh?" remarked Ben-Zayb.
- ↑ "Between this island (Talim) and Halahala point extends a strait a mile wide and a league long, which the Indians call 'Kinabutasan,' a name that in their language means 'place that was cleft open'; from which it is inferred that in other times the island was joined to the mainland and was separated from it by some severe earthquake, thus leaving this strait: of this there is an old tradition among the Indians."— Fray Martinez de Zuñiga's Estadismo (1803).
