These matters attended to, Escombe summoned the Council of Seven to the
palace, and held what might be considered his first official conference.
He began by laying before them his views as to the steps necessary to
be taken in order to carry out successfully the desire of the people to
become a regenerated nation, instructing them to cause several different
kinds of information to be obtained for him, and finally pointing out to
them the necessity for free communication with the outside world, and
the consequent establishment of something in the nature of a regular
postal and transport service between the valley and two or three points
on the railway system.
Long before he had finished all that he had to say it was perfectly
evident to the young Inca that the members of the Council--or at least
some of them--were entirely out of sympathy with many of his views and
ideas, and that he would have to contend with a vast amount of ignorance
and prejudice. To indicate a few out of many points where this lack of
sympathy most strongly manifested itself, Harry had commented upon the
necessity for establishing an army and providing it with the most modern
and efficient weapons and equipment. To this Huanacocha and his
supporters strongly objected, arguing that the State already possessed
an army in the shape of the Inca's bodyguard, horse and foot, which, in
their opinion, ought to be amply sufficient to reconquer the country in
view of the fact that Pizarro's army numbered less than two hundred men
when he captured Atahuallpa and thus achieved the conquest of Peru.
And, as to the importation of modern weapons, they were altogether
opposed to the proposal for many reasons, the chief of which were the
difficulty and delay attendant upon the procuring of them and of their
introduction into the country, and the further delay involved in
training the troops to use them. Moreover, the weapons with which the
existing troops were armed were such as they had always been accustomed
to, and in the use of which they were already thoroughly skilled. Such
a radical change as was proposed must of necessity involve an enormous
delay, and for their part they were unable to see any advantage in the
proposal. They looked with equal disfavour upon the proposal to
establish a postal and transport service, arguing that there was no need
for anything of the kind, the fundamental idea governing the settlement
of their forefathers in the valley and the founding of the City of the
Sun being that its inhabitants and the resources of the valley itself
would be amply sufficient to achieve the reconquest of the country. It
was not until Harry had very nearly lost his temper in arguing with
these men that he learned that not one of them had ever been outside the
valley, and that their very meagre knowledge of the outside world had
been derived from the few individuals who at rare intervals had been
obliged to make short and hasty journeys outside the confines of the
encircling mountains upon State business. As soon as Harry had
thoroughly grasped this fact he gave them to understand, as politely as
possible, that none of them knew in the least what they were talking
about, and for that reason he would feel himself compelled to dispense
with their advice for the future, forming his own plans in accordance
with the knowledge which he had acquired during a residence of several
years in the biggest, busiest, and best-informed city in the world; and
that henceforth he would ask of them nothing more than loyal
wholehearted obedience to his commands. He finally dismissed them with
instructions to establish immediately a service of postal runners
between the valley and the town of Juliaca on the Santa Rosa, Puno,
Arequipa, and Mollendo railway; with further instructions to arrange for
the establishment of a thoroughly trustworthy agent at Juliaca, whose
sole business it should be to see that all letters for Europe and other
parts of the world were duly stamped and posted upon receipt by him; and
to the care of whom all letters for the valley might be addressed. This
done, Escombe summoned Arima to his presence and, handing him all the
coin that he happened to have in his possession, delivered to him the
letters which he had written, together with the gold bar--by this time
securely packed and ready for posting--and directed him to proceed with
all possible speed to Islay--using the railway as far as possible in
order to save time--and there post the letters and the box containing
the bar. Then he suddenly bethought himself and, before dismissing
Arima upon his journey, sat down and wrote a long letter to Mr John
Firmin, of Lima, he who had been a fellow-passenger from England with
Harry on board the _Rimac_, In this letter he told Firmin as much of his
story as he thought it necessary for him to know, and made certain
arrangements whereby Firmin was to undertake certain business
transactions from time to time, and to supply immediately certain
necessaries, for the due delivery of which Harry gave his friend the
most minute instructions. This completed what the Inca was pleased to
regard as a very excellent and satisfactory day's work.
And now the young Englishman began to find his time very fully occupied,
so much so, indeed, that the days seemed not nearly long enough to
enable him to accomplish the half of what he wished to do. There was,
for instance, the learning of the Quichua language. Harry had not been
domiciled in his palace twenty-four hours before it had become patent to
him that this was the first task which he must undertake; for very few
of the nobles had any knowledge whatever of Spanish, and the
inconvenience and loss of time involved in conversing through an
interpreter were far too great to be passively endured. And, since he
could do very little else as satisfactorily as he would wish until he
had mastered this rich and expressive language, he devoted four hours of
every day--two in the morning and two in the evening--to its study.
Then he soon learned that, exclusive of the inhabitants of the Valley of
the Sun, there were some three hundred and fifty thousand Indians
scattered up and down the country, at least one in every ten of whom
might be counted as a fighting man. These people had to be brought into
the valley, housed, fed, disciplined, in preparation for the time when
arms should be put into their hands; also--what was more difficult
still--matters had to be so arranged that the families of these men, and
all dependent upon them, should suffer neither loss nor inconvenience
from the drafting of the able-bodied into the valley. Then the
arrangements and preparations for the importation of arms and ammunition
into the country--everything connected with which had, of course, to be
done entirely without the knowledge of the authorities--involved a
tremendous amount of hard and intricate work. It is therefore not to be
wondered at that during the first six months of his reign the young Inca
was unable to spare a single hour for amusement.
But the moment was at hand when Harry was to enjoy some sport of a quite
unique character; and the way in which it came about was thus. As he
stood one morning in the palace garden, gazing out over the lake, with
his faithful henchman Arima close at hand, an idea suddenly occurred to
him, and, turning, he remarked:
"The lake looks particularly enticing this morning, Arima. Are there
any balsas near at hand? Because, if so, you shall fetch me one, and we
will go out together to deep water and indulge in a glorious swim."
"A swim, Lord, in the deep water of the lake?" ejaculated Arima in
horror-stricken accents. "Nay, that is impossible."
"Impossible!" repeated Harry. "And why, pray?"
"Because of the monsters, Lord," answered Arima. "Were we to venture to
plunge into the lake we should almost certainly be devoured."
"Indeed!" answered Harry. "So there are monsters in the lake, are
there? I was not aware of that. And what are those `monsters'? Are
they alligators, or voracious fish, or what are they? I should hardly
have supposed that the water of the lake was warm enough for alligators
to flourish in it."
"Nay, Lord," answered Arima, "they are not alligators. I have seen
alligators in some of the northern rivers, and know them well enough to
be able to distinguish between them and the monsters which haunt our
lake. Nor are they fish; or if they be, they are quite unlike any other
fish that these eyes of mine have ever beheld. We call them `monsters'
because our forefathers did so, and because we have no other name for
them; also because of their exceeding size and malevolence."
"Ah!" commented Harry. "Well, what are these creatures--these
monsters--like, and how big are they? Have you ever seen them?"
"Yes, Lord," was the answer. "I have seen them no less than three times
at close quarters, and always with the same disastrous results. The
first time was when, during my passage of the lake on a balsa, one of my
companions had the misfortune to fall into the water. Ere the balsa
could be stopped and paddled back to where the man was struggling, two
of the monsters appeared and tore him limb from limb. The resemblance
to an alligator lies chiefly in the shape of the head, which, however,
is longer in proportion and more pointed than that of the alligator.
Also, our monsters have smooth skins, nearly black in colour, and
instead of feet and legs they have fins. The tail also is differently
shaped from that of an alligator, being wide and flat at the end."
"By Jove!" exclaimed Harry in astonishment, "they must be queer and
formidable-looking creatures indeed; and fins in place of legs and feet!
I'll be shot if I can place them at all. Are there many of them?"
"We do not generally see more than two, or three at most, although it is
on record that on one occasion, many years ago, four were seen, two of
them being obviously young ones," answered Arima.
"Upon my word, this all sounds exceedingly interesting," commented
Harry. "I should dearly like to see the creatures myself. Do they
often show themselves?"
"Very rarely, Lord, save in the case of such accidents as those of which
I have told you," answered Arima. "Yet," he continued, "if my Lord
desires to see the monsters it could doubtless be managed. If the
carcass of an animal were deposited upon yonder rock,"--the Indian
pointed to a rock showing slightly above the water's surface about a
mile from the shore--"and another were cast into the water quite near
it, the monsters would doubtless be attracted to the place; and if my
Lord were close at hand at the time, upon a large and safe balsa, he
would see them when they crawl up on the rock to reach the carcass
exposed there."
"Ah!" ejaculated Harry; "you think so? Then let the matter be arranged
for to-morrow, Arima. I confess that your description of the creatures
has powerfully excited my curiosity, and made me very anxious to see
them."
And on the morrow the young Inca's curiosity was fully gratified, and
with something to spare.
Oh, those monsters! Harry believed he possessed a passably fair general
knowledge of natural history, but these creatures--monsters truly--were
entirely new to him. In no natural history had he ever seen a
representation of anything like them. And yet, when he came to think of
it again, singular and terrifying as was their appearance, it was not
altogether unfamiliar. He believed he had seen them portrayed
somewhere, although he could not for the moment remember where. Fully
forty feet long from the snout to the tip of the tail, with a head
shaped midway between that of a pike and a crocodile, with enormous
protruding eyes, with a smooth somewhat fish-shaped body almost black
above and shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail
broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers
instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare
creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a--.
Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such
turn as above. He now distinctly remembered having read some years ago
a most interesting illustrated magazine article upon extinct animals,
and one of the pictures portrayed these identical monsters, labelling
them "Plesiosaurus"! Yes, the more Harry thought about it the less room
did he find for doubt that these so-called monsters haunting the lake in
the Valley of the Sun were actually survivors--most probably the only
ones--of the antediluvian plesiosaurus. How they got there was a most
interesting problem, yet it seemed by no means a difficult one to solve.
The conclusion at which Escombe speedily arrived--rightly or wrongly--
was that upon the subsidence of the waters of the Deluge a pair of
plesiosauri had found themselves imprisoned in the great basin of the
valley, where, the conditions presumably being exceptionally favourable,
they had not only survived but had actually contrived to perpetuate
their species to a very limited extent. And the reason why the lake was
not swarming with them, instead of containing probably only three or
four specimens at the utmost, was doubtless that the waters were too
circumscribed in extent, and too unproductive in the matter of fish, to
support more than that number.
The problem of how they came to be where they were was, however, not one
of very great importance; the thing that really mattered was, in
Escombe's opinion, that their presence in the lake constituted a
horrible danger to those who were obliged to traffic upon its waters,
and they must be destroyed. They must not be permitted to exist another
day longer than was absolutely necessary. Why, when one came to think
of it, how many hundreds of lives might not already have fallen victims
to the savage voracity of those creatures? What hope for his life would
a man have if he chanced to fall off his balsa at a moment when one of
those monsters happened to be close at hand? Positively none. Escombe
shuddered as he reflected that, ignorant as he had hitherto been of the
presence of the plesiosauri in the lake, it had only been by a series of
fortuitous circumstances--or was it the intervention of a merciful
Providence?--that he had been from time to time prevented from bathing
in the lake, ay, and actually swimming out to the distant rock, as he
had several times been strongly tempted to do.
Yes, those implacably ferocious monsters must be destroyed forthwith;
and the only point remaining to be settled was, how was the work of
destruction to be accomplished?
The plan which first suggested itself to the young Inca was the very
obvious one of fishing for them with a baited hook and line, even as
sharks were fished for. True, it would need a very big hook and a very
strong line to capture a creature of the size and strength of a
plesiosaurus; but to manufacture them was surely not beyond the
resources of the inhabitants of the valley. Yes; but there was another
matter to be considered. What about a craft from which to do the
fishing? The largest balsa that Harry had ever seen upon the lake was
not nearly big enough for the purpose; a hooked plesiosaurus would drag
it under water without an effort, and then what would become of its
occupants? The probabilities were too awful for contemplation, and the
idea was not to be entertained for a moment. Besides, a balsa was not
at all the kind of craft on which to engage in so dangerous a form of
sport, even though it were possible to build one big enough; what was
needed was a good stanch sturdy boat of, say, twenty tons or so. And,
having arrived at this point in his meditations, Escombe was naturally
reminded that he had often wished that he possessed a small yacht
wherein to disport himself on the lake. Why should he not have one?
His will was law; he had but to speak the word and the best and most
skilled workers in the valley would be at his disposal for the
construction of the vessel. And as to her design, why, he had always
been an enthusiastic yacht sailor, and knew, as well as most amateurs,
what the shape of such a craft should be, and was quite capable of
putting that shape on paper in a form that could be worked from.
Escombe's mind was made up: he would destroy those plesiosauri, and to
destroy them a suitable boat was necessary. That boat might be so
designed and built as to also afford him a great deal of pleasure, and
he would have her. And thereupon he set to work and devoted every
minute he could spare to the preparation of her design, which, a week
later, was in the hands of a small army of carpenters, eager to show
what they could do in a line of work that was entirely new to them.