So it came about that the Valley of the Lost Souls was invaded
subterraneously from opposite directions by two parties of
treasure-seekers. From one side, and quickly, came the Queen and
Leoncia, Henry Morgan, and the Solanos. Far more slowly, although they
had started long in advance, did Torres and the Jefe progress. The first
attack on the mountain had proved the chiefest obstacle. To blow open an
entrance to the Maya caves had required more dynamite than they had
originally brought, while the rock had proved stubborner than they
expected. Further, when they had finally made a way, it had proved to be
above the cave floor, so that more blasting had been required to drain
off the water. And, having blasted their way in to the water-logged
mummies of the conquistadores and to the Room of the Idols, they had to
blast their way out again and on into the heart of the mountain. But
first, ere they continued on, Torres looted the ruby eyes of Chia and
the emerald eyes of Hzatzl.
Meanwhile, with scarcely any delays, the Queen and her party penetrated
to the Valley through the mountain on the opposite side. Nor did they
entirely duplicate the course of their earlier traverse. The Queen,
through long gazing into her Mirror, knew every inch of the way. Where
the underground river plunged through the passage and out into the bosom
of the Gualaca River it was impossible to take in their boats. But, by
assiduous search under her directions, they found the tiny mouth of a
cave on the steep wall of the cliff, so shielded by a growth of mountain
berries that only by knowing for what they sought could they have found
it. By main strength, applied to the coils of rope which they had
brought along, they hoisted their canoes up the cliff, portaged them on
their shoulders through the winding passage, and launched them on the
subterranean river itself where it ran so broadly and placidly between
wide banks that they paddled easily against its slack current. At other
times, where the river proved too swift, they lined the canoes up by
towing from the bank; and wherever the river made a plunge through the
solid tie-ribs of mountain, the Queen showed them the obviously hewn and
patently ancient passages through which to portage their light crafts
around.
“Here we leave the canoes,” the Queen directed at last, and the men
began securely mooring them to the bank in the light of the flickering
torches. “It is but a short distance through the last passage. Then we
will come to a small opening in the cliff, shielded by climbing vines
and ferns, and look down upon the spot where my house once stood beside
the whirl of waters. The ropes will be necessary in order to descend the
cliff, but it is only about fifty feet.”
Henry, with an electric torch, led the way, the Queen beside him, while
old Enrico and Leoncia brought up the rear, vigilant to see that no
possible half-hearted peon or Indian boatman should slip back and run
away. But when the party came to where the mouth of the passage ought to
have been, there was no mouth. The passage ceased, being blocked off
solidly from floor to roof by a debris of crumbled rocks that varied in
size from paving stones to native houses.
“Who could have done this?” the Queen exclaimed angrily.
But Henry, after a cursory examination, reassured her.
“It’s just a slide of rock,” he said, “a superficial fault in the outer
skin of the mountain that has slipped; and it won’t take us long with
our dynamite to remedy it. Lucky we fetched a supply along.”
But it did take long. For what was the remainder of the day and
throughout the night they toiled. Large charges of explosive were not
used because of Henry’s fear of exciting a greater slip along the fault
overhead. What dynamite was used was for the purpose of loosening up the
rubble so that they could shift it back along the passage. At eight the
following morning the charge was exploded that opened up to them the
first glimmer of daylight ahead. After that they worked carefully, being
apprehensive of jarring down fresh slides. At the last, they were
baffled by a ten-ton block of rock in the very mouth of the passage.
Through crevices on either side of it they could squeeze their arms into
the blazing sunshine, yet the stone-block thwarted them. No leverage
they applied could more than quiver it, and Henry decided on one final
blast that would topple it out and down into the Valley.
“They’ll certainly know visitors are coming, the way we’ve been knocking
on their back door for the last fifteen hours,” he laughed, as he
prepared to light the fuse.
* * * * *
Assembled before the altar of the Sun God at the Long House, the entire
population was indeed aware, and anxiously aware, of the coming of
visitors. So disastrous had been their experiences with their last ones,
when the lake dwelling had been burned and their Queen lost to them,
that they were now begging the Sun God to send no more visitors. But
upon one thing, having been passionately harangued by their priest, they
were resolved; namely, to kill at sight and without parley whatever
newcomers did descend upon them.
“Even Da Vasco himself,” the priest had cried.
“Even Da Vasco!” the Lost Souls had responded.
All were armed with spears, war-clubs, and bows and arrows; and while
they waited they continued to pray before the altar. Every few minutes
runners arrived from the lake, making the same reports that while the
mountain still labored thunderously nothing had emerged from it.
The little girl of ten, the Maid of the Long House who had entertained
Leoncia, was the first to spy out new arrivals. This was made possible
because of the tribe’s attention being fixed on the rumbling mountain
beside the lake. No one expected visitors out of the mountain on the
opposite side of the valley.
“Da Vasco!” she cried. “Da Vasco!”
All looked and saw, not fifty yards away, Torres, the Jefe, and their
gang of followers, emerging into the open clearing. Torres wore again
the helmet he had filched from his withered ancestor in the Chamber of
the Mummies. Their greeting was instant and warm, taking the form of a
flight of arrows that arched into them and stretched two of the
followers on the ground. Next, the Lost Souls, men and women, charged;
while the rifles of Torres’ men began to speak. So unexpected was this
charge, so swiftly made and with so short a distance to cover, that,
though many fell before the bullets, a number reached the invaders and
engaged in a desperate hand-to-hand conflict. Here the advantage of
firearms was minimized, and gendarmes and others were thrust through by
spears or had their skulls cracked under the ponderous clubs.
In the end, however, the Lost Souls were outfought, thanks chiefly to
the revolvers that could kill in the thickest of the scuffling. The
survivors fled, but of the invaders half were down and down forever. The
women having in drastic fashion attended to every man who fell wounded.
The Jefe was spluttering with pain and rage at an arrow which had
perforated his arm; nor could he be appeased until Vicente cut off the
barbed head and pulled out the shaft.
Torres, beyond an aching shoulder where a club had hit him, was
uninjured; and he became jubilant when he saw the old priest dying on
the ground with his head resting on the little maid’s knees.
Since there were no wounded of their own to be attended to with rough
and ready surgery, Torres and the Jefe led the way to the lake, skirted
its shores, and came to the ruins of the Queen’s dwelling. Only charred
stumps of piles, projecting above the water, showed where it had once
stood. Torres was nonplussed, but the Jefe was furious.
“Here, right in this house that was, the treasure chest stood,” he
stammered.
“A wild goose chase!” the Jefe grunted. “Senor Torres, I always
suspected you were a fool.”
“How was I to know the place had been burned down?”
“You ought to have known, you who are so very wise in all things,” the
Jefe bickered back. “But you can’t fool me. I had my eye on you. I saw
you rob the emeralds and rubies from the eye-sockets of the Maya gods.
That much you shall divide with me, and now.”
“Wait, wait, be a trifle patient,” Torres begged. “Let us first
investigate. Of course, I shall divide the four gems with you——but what
are they compared with a whole chest-full? It was a light, fragile
house. The chest may have fallen into the water undamaged by fire when
the roof fell in. And water will not damage precious stones.”
In amongst the burnt piling the Jefe sent his men to investigate, and
they waded and swam about in the shoal water, being careful to avoid
being caught by the outlying suck of the whirlpool. Augustino, the
Silent, made the find, close in to shore.
“I am standing on something,” he announced, the level of the lake barely
to his knees.
Torres plunged in, and, reaching under till he buried his head and
shoulders, felt out the object.
“It is the chest, I am certain,” he declared. “—Come! All of you! Drag
this out to the dry land so that we may examine into it!”
But when this was accomplished, and just as he bent to open the lid, the
Jefe stopped him.
“Go back into the water, the lot of you,” he commanded his men. “There
are a number of chests like this, and the expedition will be a failure
if we don’t find them. One chest would not pay the expenses.”
Not until all the men were floundering and groping in the water, did
Torres raise the lid. The Jefe stood transfixed. He could only gaze and
mutter inarticulate mouthings.
“Now will you believe?” Torres queried. “It is beyond price. We are the
richest two men in Panama, in South America, in the world. This is the
Maya treasure. We heard of it when we were boys. Our fathers and our
grandfathers dreamed of it. The Conquistadores failed to find it. And it
is ours——ours!”
And, while the two men, almost stupefied, stood and stared, one by one
their followers crept out of the water, formed a silent semi-circle at
their backs, and likewise stared. Neither did the Jefe and Torres know
their men stood at their backs, nor did the men know of the Lost Souls
that were creeping stealthily upon them from the rear. As it was, all
were staring at the treasure with fascinated amazement when the attack
was sprung.
Bows and arrows, at ten yards distance, are deadly, especially when due
time is taken to make certain of aim. Two-thirds of the treasure-seekers
went down simultaneously. Through Vicente, who had chanced to be
standing directly behind Torres, no less than two spears and five arrows
had perforated. The handful of survivors had barely time to seize their
rifles and whirl, when the club attack was upon them. In this Rafael and
Ignacio, two of the gendarmes who had been on the adventure to the
Juchitan oil fields, almost immediately had their skulls cracked. And,
as usual, the Lost Souls women saw to it that the wounded did not remain
wounded long.
The end for Torres and the Jefe was but a matter of moments, when a loud
roar from the mountain followed by a crashing avalanche of rock, created
a diversion. The few Lost Souls that remained alive, darted back
terror-stricken into the shelter of the bushes. The Jefe and Torres, who
alone stood on their feet and breathed, cast their eyes up the cliff to
where the smoke still issued from the new-made hole, and saw Henry
Morgan and the Queen step into the sunshine on the lip of the cliff.
“You take the lady,” the Jefe snarled. “I shall get the Gringo Morgan if
it’s the last act of what seems a life that isn’t going to be much
longer.”
Both lifted their rifles and fired. Torres, never much of a shot, sent
his bullet fairly centered into the Queen’s breast. But the Jefe, master
marksman and possessor of many medals, made a clean miss of his target.
The next instant, a bullet from Henry’s rifle struck his wrist and
traveled up the forearm to the elbow, whence it escaped and passed on.
And as his rifle clattered to the ground he knew that never again would
that right arm, its bone pulped from wrist to elbow, have use for a
rifle.
But Henry was not shooting well. Just emerged from twenty-four hours of
darkness in the cave, not at once could his eyes adjust themselves to
the blinding dazzle of the sun. His first shot had been lucky. His
succeeding shots merely struck in the immediate neighbourhood of the
Jefe and Torres as they turned and fled madly for the brush.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, the wounded Jefe in the lead, Torres saw a woman of
the Lost Souls spring out from behind a tree and brain him with a huge
stone wielded in both her hands. Torres shot her first, then crossed
himself with horror, and stumbled on. From behind arose distant calls of
Henry and the Solano brothers in pursuit, and he remembered the vision
of his end he had glimpsed but refused to see in the Mirror of the World
and wondered if this end was near upon him. Yet it had not resembled
this place of trees and ferns and jungle. From the glimpse he remembered
nothing of vegetation——only solid rock and blazing sun and bones of
animals. Hope sprang up afresh at the thought. Perhaps that end was not
for this day, maybe not for this year. Who knew? Twenty years might yet
pass ere that end came.
Emerging from the jungle, he came upon a queer ridge of what looked like
long disintegrated lava rock. Here he left no trail, and he proceeded
carefully on beyond it through further jungle, believing once again in
his star that would enable him to elude pursuit. His plan of escape took
shape. He would find a safe hiding place until after dark. Then he would
circle back to the lake and the whirl of waters. That gained, nothing
and nobody could stop him. He had but to leap in. The subterranean
journey had no terrors for him because he had done it before. And in his
fancy he saw once more the pleasant picture of the Gualaca River
flashing under the open sky on its way to the sea. Besides, did he not
carry with him the two great emeralds and two great rubies that had been
the eyes of Chia and Hzatzl? Fortune enough, and vast good fortune, were
they for any man. What if he had failed by the Maya Treasure to become
the richest man in the world? He was satisfied. All he wanted now was
darkness and one last dive into the heart of the mountain and through
the heart of the mountain to the Gualaca flowing to the sea.
And just then, the assured vision of his escape so vividly filling his
eyes that he failed to observe the way of his feet, he dived. Nor was it
a dive into swirling waters. It was a head-foremost, dry-land dive down
a slope of rock. So slippery was it that he continued to slide down,
although he managed to turn around, with face and stomach to the
surface, and to claw wildly up with hands and feet. Such effort merely
slowed his descent, but could not stop it.
For a while, at the bottom, he lay breathless and dazed. When his senses
came back to him, he became aware first of all of something unusual upon
which his hand rested. He could have sworn that he felt teeth. At
length, opening his eyes with a shudder and summoning his resolution, he
dared to look at the object. And relief was immediate. Teeth they were,
in an indubitable, weather-white jaw-bone; but they were pig’s teeth and
the jaw was a pig’s jaw. Other bones lay about, on which his body
rested, which, on examination, proved to be the bones of pigs and of
smaller animals.
Where had he glimpsed such an arrangement of bones? He thought, and
remembered the Queen’s great golden bowl. He looked up. Ah! Mother of
God! The very place! He knew it at first sight, as he gazed up what was
a funnel at the far spectacle of day. Fully two hundred feet above him
was the rim of the funnel. The sides of hard, smooth rock sloped steeply
in and down to him, and his eyes and judgment told him that no man born
of woman could ever scale that slope.
The fancy that came to his mind caused him to spring to his feet in
sudden panic and look hastily round about him. Only on a more colossal
scale, the funnel in which he was trapped had reminded him of the
funnel-pits dug in the sand by hunting spiders that lurked at the bottom
for such prey that tumbled in upon them. And, his vivid fancy leaping,
he had been frightened by the thought that some spider monster, as
colossal as the funnel-pit, might possibly be lurking there to devour
him. But no such denizen occurred. The bottom of the pit, circular in
form, was a good ten feet across and carpeted, he knew not how deep, by
a debris of small animals’ bones. Now for what had the Mayas of old time
made so tremendous an excavation? he questioned; for he was more than
half-convinced that the funnel was no natural phenomenon.
Before nightfall he made sure, by a dozen attempts, that the funnel was
unscalable. Between attempts, he crouched in the growing shadow of the
descending sun and panted dry-lipped with heat and thirst. The place was
a very furnace, and the juices of his body were wrung from him in
profuse perspiration. Throughout the night, between dozes, he vainly
pondered the problem of escape. The only way out was up, nor could his
mind devise any method of getting up. Also, he looked forward with
terror to the coming of the day, for he knew that no man could survive a
full ten hours of the baking heat that would be his. Ere the next
nightfall the last drop of moisture would have evaporated from his body
leaving him a withered and already half-sun-dried mummy.
With the coming of daylight his growing terror added wings to his
thought, and he achieved a new and profoundly simple theory of escape.
Since he could not climb up, and since he could not get out through the
sides themselves, then the only possible remaining way was down. Fool
that he was! He might have been working through the cool night hours,
and now he must labour in the quickly increasing heat. He applied
himself in an ecstasy of energy to digging down through the mass of
crumbling bones. Of course, there was a way out. Else how did the funnel
drain? Otherwise it would have been full or part full of water from the
rains. Fool! And thrice times thrice a fool!
He dug down one side of the wall, flinging the rubbish into a mound
against the opposite side. So desperately did he apply himself that he
broke his finger-nails to the quick and deeper, while every finger-tip
was lacerated to bleeding. But love of life was strong in him, and he
knew it was a life-and-death race with the sun. As he went deeper, the
rubbish became more compact, so that he used the muzzle of his rifle
like a crowbar to loosen it, ere tossing it up in single and double
handfuls.
By mid-forenoon, his senses beginning to reel in the heat, he made a
discovery. Upon the wall which he had uncovered, he came upon the
beginning of an inscription, evidently rudely scratched in the rock by
the point of a knife. With renewed hope, his head and shoulders down in
the hole, he dug and scratched for all the world like a dog, throwing
the rubbish out and between his legs in true dog-fashion. Some of it
fell clear, but most of it fell back and down upon him. Yet had he
become too frantic to note the inefficiency of his effort.
At last the inscription was cleared, so that he was able to read:
Peter McGill, of Glasgow. On March 12, 1820,
I escaped from the Pit of Hell by this passage by
digging down and finding it.
A passage! The passage must be beneath the inscription! Torres now
toiled in a fury. So dirt-soiled was he that he was like some huge,
four-legged, earth-burrowing animal. The dirt got into his eyes, and, on
occasion, into his nostrils and air passages so as to suffocate him and
compel him to back up out of the hole and sneeze and cough his breathing
apparatus clear. Twice he fainted. But the sun, by then almost directly
overhead, drove him on.
He found the upper rim of the passage. He did not dig down to the lower
rim; for the moment the aperture was large enough to accommodate his
lean shape, he writhed and squirmed into it and away from the destroying
sun-rays. The cool and the dark soothed him, but his joy and the
reaction from what he had undergone sent his pulse giddily up, so that
for the third time he fainted.
Recovered, mouthing with black and swollen lips a half-insane chant of
gratefulness and thanksgiving, he crawled on along the passage. Perforce
he crawled, because it was so low that a dwarf could not have stood
erect in it. The place was a charnel house. Bones crunched and crumbled
under his hands and knees, and he knew that his knees were being worn to
the bone. At the end of a hundred feet he caught his first glimmering of
light. But the nearer he approached freedom, the slower he progressed,
for the final stages of exhaustion were coming upon him. He knew that it
was not physical exhaustion, nor food exhaustion, but thirst exhaustion.
Water, a few ounces of water, was all he needed to make him strong
again. And there was no water.
But the light was growing stronger and nearer. He noted, toward the
last, that the floor of the passage pitched down at an angle of fully
thirty degrees. This made the way easier. Gravity drew him on, and
helped every failing effort of him, toward the source of light. Very
close to it, he encountered an increase in the deposit of bones. Yet
they bothered him little, for they had become an old story, while he was
too exhausted to mind them.
He did observe, with swimming eyes and increasing numbness of touch,
that the passage was contracting both vertically and horizontally.
Slanting downward at thirty degrees, it gave him an impression of a
rat-trap, himself the rat, descending head foremost toward he knew not
what. Even before he reached it, he apprehended that the slit of bright
day that advertised the open world beyond was too narrow for the egress
of his body. And his apprehension was verified. Crawling unconcernedly
over a skeleton that the blaze of day showed him to be a man’s, he
managed, by severely and painfully squeezing his ears flat back, to
thrust his head through the slitted aperture. The sun beat down upon his
head, while his eyes drank in the openness of the freedom of the world
that the unyielding rock denied to the rest of his body.
Most maddening of all was a running stream not a hundred yards away,
tree-fringed beyond, with lush meadow-grass leading down to it from his
side. And in the tree-shadowed water, knee-deep and drowsing, stood
several cows of the dwarf breed peculiar to the Valley of Lost Souls.
Occasionally they flicked their tails lazily at flies, or changed the
distribution of their weight on their legs. He glared at them to see
them drink, but they were evidently too sated with water. Fools! Why
should they not drink, with all that wealth of water flowing idly by!
They betrayed alertness, turning their heads toward the far bank and
pricking their ears forward. Then, as a big antlered buck came out from
among the trees to the water’s edge, they flattened their ears back and
shook their heads and pawed the water till he could hear the splashing.
But the stag disdained their threats, lowered his head, and drank. This
was too much for Torres, who emitted a maniacal scream which, had he
been in his senses, he would not have recognised as proceeding from his
own throat and larynx.
The stag sprang away. The cattle turned their heads in Torres’
direction, drowsed, their eyes shut, and resumed the flicking of flies.
With a violent effort, scarcely knowing that he had half-torn off his
ears, he drew his head back through the slitted aperture and fainted on
top of the skeleton.
Two hours later, though he did not know the passage of time, he regained
consciousness, and found his own head cheek by jowl with the skull of
the skeleton on which he lay. The descending sun was already shining
into the narrow opening, and his gaze chanced upon a rusty knife. The
point of it was worn and broken, and he established the connection. This
was the knife that had scratched the inscription on the rock at the base
of the funnel at the other end of the passage, and this skeleton was the
bony framework of the man who had done the scratching. And Alvarez
Torres went immediately mad.
“Ah, Peter McGill, my enemy,” he muttered. “Peter McGill of Glasgow who
betrayed me to this end.—This for you!—And this!—And this!”
So speaking, he drove the heavy knife into the fragile front of the
skull. The dust of the bone which had once been the tabernacle of Peter
McGill’s brain arose in his nostrils and increased his frenzy. He
attacked the skeleton with his hands, tearing at it, disrupting it,
filling the pent space about him with flying bones. It was like a
battle, in which he destroyed what was left of the mortal remains of the
one time resident of Glasgow.
Once again Torres squeezed his head through the slit to gaze at the
fading glory of the world. Like a rat in the trap caught by the neck in
the trap of ancient Maya devising, he saw the bright world and day dim
to darkness as his final consciousness drowned in the darkness of death.
But still the cattle stood in the water and drowsed and flicked at
flies, and, later, the stag returned, disdainful of the cattle, to
complete its interrupted drink.