Inside the great stone chamber of the first floor, twenty-nine decapitated black bodies were piled. Relatives of the dead had been allowed to spread cloths over them earlier in the day, after they were cut down from the gallows from which they had been hanged and their heads placed on spikes, but the flies still swarmed around them. The people who had come now, at the hour spread about by word of mouth—black men and women and Spanish friars and a number of Indians, all of whom wanted to help—at first found themselves in shock.
