I found a place where I could rest and eat; and there I cut steaks from
the deer with a quaint knife which had been given me by Atupo--for I now
prided myself on being a hunter of experience--and made a fire of dried
sticks and leaves.
The heat of the night was excessive, and I had little need of the
warmth; but I was glad of the light of the flames, for I was still much
shaken by my adventure with the great constrictor, and had imagined
vague, savage enemies amid the dark thickets that hedged me in.
It will be noted that I have referred to the snake as a "constrictor";
but, from this, it must not be thought that the monster was a boa. The
family of the boas, known scientifically as the _boidae_, contains many
species which are to be found in all parts of the world: the diamond
snake of Australia, the rock python of Natal, the Indian python, and the
great South American genera--the anaconda and the true boa-constrictor.
All these reptiles are remarkable for the partial development of hinder
limbs, proving conclusively that the snakes and lizards are nearly
related to one another. These rudimentary limbs, however, are not
visible in the living animals, being covered by the skin, but are quite
evident in their skeletons. It is also of interest to remember that
birds have evolved from reptiles, the forelegs having been converted
into wings.
All the constrictors kill their prey by crushing, and none have
poison-fangs; and though these species are, with one or two exceptions,
the largest snakes in the world, they move, whether in the water or
among the tree-tops, in absolute silence. That which I myself attacked
was undoubtedly an anaconda; and I know this for sure, because, though
the light was bad, I distinctly saw two rows of great, dark spots upon
his back, and not a black chain, which is the distinguishing mark of the
boa-constrictor. Besides, the anaconda is essentially a water-snake,
whereas the boa, though he will take readily to water, lives as a rule
among the trees.
Well, though I shudder when I think of the brute, I had no real cause at
the time to abuse him, for I might not have slain the deer with my
blow-pipe, and I was now supplied with food so long as the meat would
keep in that steaming hothouse of a jungle.
I did not sleep so well that night, weary though I was. I think I was
not so much afraid as oppressed by an almost overwhelming sense of
loneliness.
Quite suddenly I realised, as I sat by my camp-fire, chewing the venison
steaks--which were inordinately tough--that I was utterly alone. For
weeks I had enjoyed the company of Atupo, and before that of the wild
men; and even Amos and his companions, my sworn enemies, had human
voices to which I had been wont to listen of an evening by the fire when
the day's march was ended. But here was I indeed, alone in the dark
wilderness, and I could not but recognise that the woods around me were
alive, that life in a thousand shapes and forms was all about me,
unseen, but not unheard.
For I listened to strange and little noises everywhere--upon the ground,
in the thick undergrowth, among the great trees that towered above me.
My strained ears heard, perhaps, sounds that never were; but I know that
great moths came fluttering to my fire, and leaves moved where insects
crept and crawled, and now and again some kind of cricket would begin to
sing, only to cease quite suddenly, I should think, on the approach of
danger.
They all lived, thought I, on sufferance, by the grace of the great God
who made them all, and me as well. For I was one with them, even these
little living things of the endless wilderness, encompassed by so many
dangers, at the mercy of the great forces of Nature that might at any
moment rise against us and stamp out our little lives.
And I thought, too, of Amos. In the silence and the darkness, my old
dread of the man returned; and I asked myself where was he all these
months, and what were he and his companions doing?
I knew that, like myself, he had been searching for the Treasure in this
same Wood of the Red Fish; but I could not think that he was still in
the neighbourhood. At the time, of course, I knew nothing of Forsyth's
wound, which had delayed Baverstock so long; and when I afterwards came
to work the matter out, I arrived at the conclusion that Amos must have
left the wood on the very night when I encountered the anaconda. He
then returned to the temple, and, finding both the ruins and the village
quite deserted, gave unholy vent to his wrath by burning everything that
fire could touch. He then came back upon his own tracks, by way of the
suspension bridge, drawn to the Red Fish like steel to a magnet, for the
man's soul itself was magnetised by gold.
And all this time was I searching in the wood. For ten days I roamed
here and there, living upon wild fruits and berries, and the birds I
slew with my blow-pipe. Atupo had given me certain vague directions,
which had seemed clear enough to me at the time. However, the man's
knowledge of our language was but imperfect, and the wood itself a
veritable maze, a labyrinth of shallow, twisting tunnels, from which the
sunlight was eternally shut out.
I wandered daily, lost in very truth, and came often to the Glade of
Silent Death, near which place I would never venture to sleep for fear
of the great serpent that I knew lay somewhere in the pool.
On the tenth night of my wanderings, I received something in the nature
of a shock. I had made my camp-fire somewhat earlier than was my wont,
and a small, gay-feathered bird that I had shot and plucked was roasting
over the red-hot charcoal, when, of a sudden, a shot from a rifle rang
out in the woods not far from where I was.
I sprang to my feet, in a high state of alarm, and kicked the fire
broadcast, for I had gone barefooted for so long that the soles of my
feet were like leather. And even as I did so, several other shots were
fired in quick succession.
I ate my bird half cooked--for I was hungry--and sat in the darkness for
hour upon hour, certain that Amos himself was near at hand, and filled
with apprehension.
I had a good mind that night to give up my quest, to return to the
grassland, where I could breathe the open air and feel the warmth of
Heaven's sun upon me, hoping that thence I might somehow find my way
back to the abodes of civilised men. I was sick at heart for want of
the sound of a human voice and the sight of those I loved.
What would be my fate in that dark wilderness, armed only with my
blow-pipe, if I should fall into the hands of men like Amos Baverstock
and Trust? In my thinking, the shots that I had heard could have been
fired by no one else. And yet, of my own free will, for three days
longer I delayed within the wood; and now, when I can look back upon
those wild, adventurous days, I am devoutly thankful that I did.
My own audacity can be explained, I think, by the fact that I was now
three parts a savage. I was, as one might say, on friendly terms with
danger. Peril and I had sojourned together for so long that I had come
to regard even grim Death itself as no such weighty matter. Life was no
more to me than to the little wild things that I daily slew for food.
And so, for three days, I continued my searching in the jungle, howbeit
acting more cautiously than before, making little noise and pausing
frequently to listen.
And then, by chance, I made a great discovery. At the time, in very
truth, I did believe that I beheld the manifestation of a miracle; and I
warrant that he that reads this will think the same, when I have set
down the facts as they occurred.
I came, late of an afternoon, upon an open place where there were rocks
among the trees; and between these rocks the ground was soft, the soil
quite black, being composed of the decayed vegetation of many tropic
seasons. Here I found footmarks of living men, and, moreover, men who
were no strangers to leather boots.
That more than one of them had visited this very place, I was well
convinced, since the footmarks bore evidence of at least two pairs of
boots--one with great hobnails, and the other without. I never doubted
that I had hit upon the trail of Amos and his friends; and I had--as I
thought--sure proof of this, a little after, when I came upon an empty
cartridge-case.
The most of us believe that we have latent abilities, little suspected
by our friends, that we are never called upon to use. I have heard it
said that the great Duke of Wellington thought little of himself as
soldier, but far too much of his reputation as a politician. And on
this occasion it was something pleasing to my vanity to play the part of
a detective, though I knew not the very alphabet of the business. I
examined the footmarks, and made quite sure that I had found the trail
of Joshua Trust, who wore, I knew, a pair of heavy boots with hobnails;
and the brass cartridge-case--which I have kept to this day as a
memento--had, I surmised, once been the property of Amos. So I went
down on hands and knees, groping in the half-light of the woods to see
what else I could discover. And whilst thus employed, I hit upon the
miracle that all but cost me life itself.
I found a place beneath the rocks where there was a smooth stone slab,
fashioned plainly by the hand of man. And this rocked gently when I
pressed my weight upon it, which suggested that it had been moved quite
recently.
In any case, both the shape and the size of the thing bewildered me, for
it was all the world like a tombstone. And one would not think to find
tombstones in the tropic wilderness beneath the Andes.
I found the stone quite easy to lift, for it was thin as a plank, and
had a hole in the middle, through which I could place a hand. And then
I stood gazing into the cavity below.
And as I gazed, I gasped. I drew back a little, with a quick catch of
the breath, and then came forward once again, to stand staring, like one
who is entirely daft, at what lay at my feet.
For the round moon, of a surety, shone down into a tomb; and there
before me was a corpse--or what had been a corpse, four hundred years
ago. There lay a skeleton, white-boned and horrible--moreover, a
skeleton that was encased in armour.
He who lay there before me in the moonlight had once been a man and a
soldier of old Spain; for his bony hands were crossed upon his chest and
held between them the handle of a naked sword. And at his head was a
steel helmet, and the trunk of his body was enclosed in a breastplate;
so that I could see naught but his grinning skull and the white bones of
his legs and arms.
I stood and looked, and wondered. I wondered who he was, how he had
come there, and of the tales that he could tell, were life to return to
this bold adventurer of four hundred years ago. Though I do not fear
death more than most men, I dread even to this day to look upon the face
of it; and it took me time to gather my courage in both hands and to
light a fire by the graveside, that I might see the better and solve so
much of the mystery as I could.
I have no proof--for we can seldom prove the past--but must weigh what
evidence there is. For all that, I am convinced--now that I have
thought and talked of it all to John Bannister and others--that I looked
then upon the remnants of one of the soldiers of the gallant Orellano.
I could not judge of the quality of the rusted steel of his breastplate
and his sword; but I should think that he had been an officer of some
distinction; since, on close inspection, I discovered that the long
blade had been damascened in silver, a metal that will never rust. And
that set my mind a-thinking of the great and gallant men who had been
the first to cross to the Pacific, to whom to-day--in spite of all their
bigotry and cruelty--the world owes so much.
If one of Orellano's followers had lain buried in this place for all
this time, how nearly had the Spaniards come to finding the Greater
Treasure! I was not far, I knew, from the Big Fish, though I had
searched the Wood for days and never found it. And Orellano had crossed
the mountains to the west in search of El Dorado, and, having failed in
his purpose, had gone on down to the great river, and thence to the
Atlantic. And here lay one of his stout-hearted lieutenants, buried
like a Christian warrior, with the arms he had fought with, within a few
miles from where the Treasure lay.
Wonder-struck, and not without great reverence, I put back the sword
between those bony hands, and then lifted the helmet to see if that,
too, could tell me anything concerning this tragedy of long ago.
Besides, I was curious to know how the man had met his death. Had he
been slain by a savage Indian? Or had he died of some fell, tropical
disease? And so I took the helmet in my hands; and when I did so,
something white fell out.
I stooped and picked it up, and then examined it by the fire that I had
lighted. It was parchment--it was a fragment of a map--a piece torn
from the corner of a larger sheet. I looked at it and rubbed my eyes,
and looked again, to be sure that I was not dreaming.
If I did not dream, then I was wholly mad. The thought came to me that
I had fallen into a fever, and now suffered one of those delusions which
are common enough when the heart is racing and the brow dry and burning.
I felt my pulse and the skin upon my forearm, and found that I was wet
with sweat. Nor was I mad or dreaming, for I was Dick Treadgold, and my
home lay far away, upon the Sussex shore. And yet, that which I held in
my hand was the very fragment of John Bannister's map which I myself had
torn from the hands of Amos Baverstock--that same fragment which I had
thrust, to the full length of my arm, down a rabbit-hole, by Middleton,
for fear that it should fall into the possession of that scoundrel,
Joshua Trust.
There can be no disputing the testimony of a torn piece of paper. There
is, I believe, a celebrated murder trial, quoted in books of law as an
example of irrefutable circumstantial evidence, wherein the murderer and
the murdered man are each found in possession of a torn piece of
newspaper, these two fragments fitting together line for line without a
letter missing.
You will never tear a sheet of paper twice in precisely the same way,
though you try a million times. In this case, I had the evidence of my
eyes and of my memory. It was the very fragment I had snatched from the
hands of Amos; I remembered the shape of it; I remembered the shape also
of the torn edge of the map that Amos himself had carried into the
wilderness; and, above all, there were the letters "AHAZAXA," the
rending of the parchment having decapitated the name "Cahazaxa."
At first sight, what could look more like a miracle? There was no
question of coincidence. Here were two facts that, normally, could in
no way be related to one another: a rabbit burrows a hole for himself
upon the sandhills by the English Channel, and in the sixteenth century
a brave Spanish soldier lays down his life, and is buried in the
wilderness of South America. It will be readily understood that it took
me time to realise what I could certainly not explain.
How came that fragment there? And why? I regarded the stained and
yellow parchment that I held in my hand as I sat by the side of the
fire, and felt even a trifle afraid of it. I had heard stories of
mummies coming to life, of inanimate objects--such as jasper scarabaei,
totems, and wooden, heathen gods--becoming active agencies for good or
evil. Had this thing taken wings upon itself, and flown across half the
world? Fate or luck--call it what you will--had guided me to find it.
But why should a document so precious have sought a refuge in the rusted
helmet of a soldier of fortune, who once, perhaps, had clinked his sword
in the gay courts of Granada or the narrow streets of old Cadiz, who lay
now amid the silence of the tropic jungle--a few blanched and silly
bones?
I had no answer for these questions of my own, though I sat long into
the night and racked my brains for a solution of the problem. It was,
in consequence, an hour, as I should guess, before I could look the bare
fact in the countenance, before I could acknowledge the situation as it
was.
No matter how it came there, by means comprehensible or supernatural,
there it was. And then, quite suddenly, I realised what it was. _I had
as good as found the Treasure_.