"Friend?" said he; and though he pronounced the word in the strangest
fashion, I at once took his meaning.
I assured him of my good intentions, that I was no friend of those who
had committed so dastardly an outrage. And at that, though in the
greatest pain--as I could see--he smiled and thanked me.
I will not repeat word for word the childish broken English that he
talked. He knew nouns enough to express his meaning, but this was all
of our language that he had, and for verbs he was obliged to fall back
upon grimaces and gesticulations. These, however, were so forcible and
graphic that I was never at a loss to understand him: and during the six
weeks that this man and I lived together in the ruins, whilst his broken
leg was mending, he came to speak quite fluently in my language,
whereas--to my shame, be it confessed--I learned not a dozen words of
his.
I asked him how he had picked up his English; and since I had already
guessed his answer, the familiar sound of that fond name was no less
pleasant in my ears.
"John Bannister," said he; and then asked me eagerly where Bannister now
was.
I shook my head, telling him as simply and as briefly as I could the
whole of my adventures, from the time when I was kidnapped a few miles
from my home beyond the seas to the day when I took my departure from
the habitations of the wild men of the woods.
His story I got from him by degrees, after I had tended to his wounds. I
had no knowledge of surgery, but I knew that a broken leg must be made
fast to a splint; and, borrowing a knife, I returned that very evening
to the forest, and cut a straight branch from a tree, as well as a long
coil of liana, which I wound about my shoulders like a garden-hose.
I peeled the bark from two sides of the branch to make it as smooth as
possible, and then bound it tightly to the poor man's leg by means of
the liana. I bathed his wound daily with the clean water from the
spring within the vault; and in a few days the blood ceased to flow and
the wound--a rough, ugly rent from a leaden bullet--began to heal.
There was a plentiful supply of food within the chamber--bananas, dried
berries, and manioc; and together we lived, this man and I, in
uneventful idleness, he flat upon his back on a bed of rushes, I
attending to his daily wants.
He claimed direct descent from the _incas_ of Old Peru. He told me much
that I already knew: that in the great land which had been discovered by
Pizarro there had been two races, the common Peruvians and those of
_inca_ stock. The latter was the nobility of the land, being of royal
blood; and it was they who had held the important offices of state and
formed the priesthood.
Centuries ago, upon the fall of Cuzco, Cahazaxa, one of the greatest
nobles in the kingdom, escorted by an army of priests and soldiers,
conveyed the Greater Treasure across the mountains, and hid it in the
forest that extends across the whole valley of the Upper Amazon and its
tributaries. The Spaniards got wind of this, and some years afterwards,
in the year 1541, an expedition led by the redoubtable Orellano, a
lieutenant of Gonzalo Pizarro, crossed the eastern chain of the Andes in
search of El Dorado, or that country which was then but vaguely known as
the Land of the Gilded King.
This "Gilded King" was Cahazaxa himself, who, at the time of Orellano's
famed expedition, had been for some months dead. But the little
civilised colony that he had established in the wilderness survived, and
continued to survive until the middle of the last century, when I myself
beheld the last of it.
Now, in the narration of historical and other facts, I have the greatest
regard for a certain principle, established by the Greeks: the habit of
reserving for its proper place each item of information, whether it be
of primary or secondary importance. On that account, I ask you,
therefore, for the space of a chapter or so, to bear in mind the famous
name of Orellano and his search for the Land of the Gilded King--an
affair to which I must soon refer again. I set down now only that which
the _inca_ himself told me, together with such historical facts as were
known to me at the time.
Cahazaxa was dead; and he was buried in a cavern, high amidst the
cloud-wrapped mountains, where his soul might rest in peace the nearer
to the God he worshipped--the life-giving and almighty Sun, who, as he
held, in the very dawn of the ages had sent Manco Copac and Mama Oello
Huaco to earth, to make the Incas of Peru glorious and great.
Orellano, the Spaniard, failed to find the Treasure. Undergoing the
most terrible privations, he and his gallant followers pierced the
forest, and, making one of the most remarkable journeys in the whole
history of exploration, descended into the main stream of the great
River of Mystery--as I call the Amazon--and, finally, after eight months
of hardship and of peril, came within sight of the Atlantic.
The courage of these men is much to be commended. The modern explorer
has at his service breech-loading magazine rifles, invaluable
geographical and scientific knowledge, and an adequate supply of
suitable food and drugs. But these bold Spaniards of the sixteenth
century had nothing, save their own stout hearts and strong Toledo
blades. Enough has been written concerning their greed, their bigotry
and cruelty. The story might be told again and again of their
indomitable bravery. Orellano knew not whither he was going. When he
decided to shoot the rapids, taking his life in his hands, he might as
well have thrown dice with Death. How can we do aught but honour the
land that has produced such sons as Cortez and Pizarro, Orellano, Vasco
Nunez, and Alonzo de Ojeda?
But, for the present, we are more concerned with Cahazaxa, a hero no
less than these doughty Spaniards. He and his followers hid themselves
in the wilderness, and there both Orellano and Pizarro himself failed to
find them; and in this there is little to wonder at, when we consider
the immensity of the great Forest of the Amazon.
They built for themselves a massive temple after the fashion of the
sacred palaces of Quito and Cuzco, dedicated to the Sun; and in course
of time they constructed roads and bridges across the rivers, founding
for themselves a colony where the civilisation of the _incas_ lived for
a century or more after their own country across the mountains had
fallen under the dominion of the hated Spaniard.
This was the land of the Gilded King, the country of El Dorado. Word of
its existence came to Quito, from the lips of savage aborigines prone
naturally to exaggeration; but, though party after party of avaricious,
bold adventurers crossed the mountains, the Peruvian settlement remained
undisturbed. The secret of the "Big Fish" was never discovered either
by the Spaniards or the Portuguese, who in the next century came up the
great river from the east, traversing the country that is now called
Brazil.
I did not learn all this from the _inca_ priest himself; but so much of
it as he could not tell me I knew already from what I had read of those
golden days when the New World was a land of Mystery and Romance, and
men thought and talked of doubloons instead of dollars.
It is true, I never beheld with my own eyes the actual civilisation of
ancient Peru as it had existed in Cahazaxa's time, because, many years
before, it had died a natural death. The Peruvians, born and bred upon
the western sea-board or the great tablelands beyond the Andes, were not
able to survive in the humid atmosphere of the tropic forest. In course
of time, a colony of several thousands, whom Cahazaxa had led across the
mountains, had dwindled to a community of a few families of the old
_inca_ stock, the majority of whom served as priests of the Sun in the
great ruined temple, constructed by their forefathers, which they were
not able to keep in repair.
It was these men, descended in a direct line from the _incas_ whom the
Spanish conquerors had driven forth from Cuzco and Quito, who guarded
the secret of the Greater Treasure. It was they who were treacherously
attacked and foully done to death by Amos Baverstock. And I will now
relate the full story of that brutal enterprise as I got it from the
lips of the man whom I befriended.
Baverstock, with his three companions, had come to the temple some weeks
before, on the day they had tied me to the tree and left me to starve to
death.
The priests had been greatly alarmed at the sight of the intruder, whom
they recognised at once. They remembered the time when Baverstock and
Trust had attacked the temple, and they had been obliged to fight for
their lives, and would then and there have been slaughtered, had it not
been for John Bannister, who placed himself at their head and drove Amos
forth.
But Bannister was no longer with them to fortify them with his courage,
to preside at their councils, and to deal death to their enemies with
his swift, unerring aim. And they were terrified at the very sight of
Amos, as I myself had been when I first set eyes on the man upon the
Sussex shore.
He demanded to know where the Greater Treasure was hidden. He reminded
them that they had lied to him once, and held forth threats that made
their blood run cold. If they lied to him again, he would return, and
no man of them would live to fool Amos Baverstock a third time.
Now, they dared not speak the truth, for they were sworn to secrecy
before the Sun, which they believed to be the Creator of the Universe;
and yet, they dared not lie, for they knew Amos would be as good, or as
evil, as his word.
So, swearing upon all things they looked upon as holy, they set Amos and
his friends upon the right road to the "Big Fish." They told him to
follow a certain track across the grassland, until he came to a range of
down-like, grass-clad hills. Thence, to the west, lay a wood in
mid-valley, and in a glade in this wood the Treasure was buried, the
place being marked by a great red stone, standing forth in the form of a
monster fish in the act of leaping from the water. Here, clearly, was
the origin of the legend, current among the natives even to this day, of
the Big and Little Fishes. And when I heard the story as it was told me
by the _inca_ priest, I confess I was conscious that my heart beat more
rapidly and the warm blood of my youth was stirred within me.
But Amos Baverstock cared nothing for legend. He lived only to lay
hands upon a horde of untold gold; and that same day he left the Temple
of Cahazaxa and set forth to the west upon his treasure hunt.
And when he was gone, the priests held conference, demanding of Atupo
why he had told their enemy so much of their cherished secret--for Atupo
was the name of the surviving priest with whom I talked among the temple
ruins. For he it was who devised the scheme whereby he hoped both to
save the lives of his friends and to preserve the Greater Treasure; and
now that all had failed so dreadfully, to the great pain he suffered
from his wound was added anguish and remorse, inasmuch as the blame was
his.
He advised them to arm themselves, and took with him ten of the best
archers of the little community, ordering them to steep the heads of
their arrows in the juice of the venomous weed that grows in the
forest--which is nothing more or less than strychnine, one of the most
virulent of poisons.
Atupo, with these ten men, who were all young and fleet of foot,
traversed the grassland by a series of forced marches by night, so that
they outdistanced Amos and reached first the Wood of the Red Fish--for
so, with a little latitude, may be translated the old Peruvian name. And
there they laid an ambush by a pathway along which Amos, and those with
him, would be obliged to pass, and each archer was instructed to pick
out his man. Four were detailed to shoot at Amos, three at Trust, and
two each at Forsyth and the Spaniard, Vasco.
Now, it seems not possible that a plan so well thought out could fail;
and yet, it would seem also that here, at least, the devil helped his
own.
For Mr. Forsyth, and not Amos, came first to the ambuscade; and of the
two arrows, one struck a silver tobacco tin that he chanced to be
carrying that day in the pocket over his heart, and the other sheared
off his right ear as cleanly as a tailor snips his cloth with a pair of
scissors. And in the fraction of a second, Forsyth, all bleeding from
the head, had his revolver from its holster, and had shot down two of
the priests.
Thus was the alarm given to Amos and those who followed him; and there
was no question of a surprise. It came to a hand-to-hand affair, and
then a running fight amid the woodland undergrowth, in which the bow and
arrow had but a small chance against modern firearms. One by one, the
priests were dropped in their tracks, and only Atupo himself escaped
with life, though sorely wounded in the leg.
He got clear of the wood, and lay hidden, day after day, in the long
grass of the plain, journeying by night towards the forest, endeavouring
to reach the ruined Temple of Cahazaxa. Though his leg was not then
broken, he could do no more than crawl a few miles at a time, so that he
was long weeks upon the road.
And during all these days, Amos beat the wood from west to east, from
south to north, and failing to find the "Red Fish," believed that he had
again been sent upon a wild-goose chase; and the more firm was he in
this conviction since there had been such treachery on the part of the
_inca_ priests.
I heard afterwards that his wrath was like that of a madman; he stamped
and raved, and swore that he would return to the temple and put every
living soul to death. And yet, they could not move a yard upon their
backward journey, until Forsyth's life was out of danger.
Without doubt, Mr. Gilbert Forsyth would have died in torture, there
amid the foothills of the distant Andes, had it not been for his own
promptitude and courage. For no sooner did he feel the poison working
inward from the wound where the arrow had cut off an ear, than he thrust
the blade of a hunting-knife into a glowing charcoal camp-fire, and
himself placed the red-hot steel upon the lacerated flesh.
And though he fainted at the time, and fell afterwards into a raging
fever, this action saved, perhaps, his life. In the wilderness,
rough-and-ready methods are often unavoidable; only he who is bold and
strong can survive, whilst the weakling falls by the way. That Forsyth,
despite his affectations and his London ways, was a man of action who
could face pain as well as danger, this deed of his was in itself enough
to prove. With his own hand he burned the poison from his flesh.
For all that, he lingered for many days betwixt life and death; and it
was the delay caused thereby that gave Atupo time to regain the temple.
He had intended to give warning to his brother priests, and for this
purpose he arrived none too soon. Many were so alarmed at the news of
the disaster that they departed instantly, seeking shelter in the forest
and taking with them their wives and families. But three remained, to
collect the sacred lamps and vessels that were within the Temple,
meaning to set forth the following day. And these were caught at
midnight by Amos, who turned assassin then and there; for it was he who
killed them with his own hands, in the great vault beneath the ruins.
Atupo, too, he shot, though the man lay wounded on the ground, exhausted
after the effort of his long journey across the grassland, and left him
there for dead, his already wounded leg fractured a few inches below the
hip.
All this I learned from the man himself, while I nursed him under the
Temple--all save the story of the fortitude of Mr. Forsyth, of which I
heard afterwards, as in due time I will tell.