gave me the clue I needed. According to this account, you were killed in
the mine explosion, and no trace of your body or clothing was found. It
was long afterwards, in Arthur's report, that your reappearance, under
peculiar circumstances, was described. Since then I have learned of your
travels. But I have noticed that you always avoid any reference to your
South American experiences. So, I appealed to the psychometer."
Leighton, absorbed in his notes, was apparently unaware of the
eagerness with which David followed his explanation.
"It's all very simple," mused the young man. "And yet, it seemed like
necromancy."
"Science is not necromancy."
"But the report," urged David; "I didn't know Raoul had written a
report."
"You know he is a psychologist, a hypnotist?"
"Yes," was the answer, with something of a shudder. "But--why all this
elaborate experiment of yours?"
"To prove a theory--and to be certain about you."
"Why?"
"What a question! You expect to marry Una. Before your marriage takes
place--if it does take place--I wish to clear up whatever mystery there
is hanging over your past."
"And your experiment has shown you----?" David asked in a low voice.
"It confirms the theories of Tarchanoff and Jung," he replied
pedantically. "It proves the intimate connection existing between mental
and physical phenomena. The personal result is still incomplete. On that
side I must know more."
"I will tell you what I can," said David resolutely. "But first--what
has Raoul written about me?"
"Merely a reference. Read it after you have told me your story. Our
experiment is still unfinished, you know."
"Unfortunately, I can't tell you the very thing you want to know. The
series of words in your test seemed to revive some forgotten nightmare;
and the horror of it was that this nightmare kept just beyond my
reach--as it always does--its riddle unsolved. This, with your strange
knowledge of what had happened, surprised me into this ridiculous
weakness."
"So I thought," said Leighton. "Now, what do you remember?"
"I'll have to go back a little. But--you probably know it all, you know
so much of my history."
"Never mind. I want you to prove the truth of what I know."
David looked at Leighton doubtfully.
"Very well," he said, "I'll do what I can."
Much of his story, as he told it, was decidedly vague. In the main
outline, however, it was simple enough, although ending in a mystery
that he was unable to clear up.
Three years ago, it seems, David went to work on a project based on
a legend belonging to prehistoric America. Traditions of the immense
wealth and the civilization found in certain parts of South America
by the Spanish conquerors had always fascinated him. And of all these
traditions the one telling of El Dorado, the Gilded Man, interested him
most.
From the early South American chronicles he learned that, within a few
years of Pizarro's discovery of Peru, three other explorers, starting
independently from points on the Caribbean and Pacific coasts, after
months of perilous adventure, reached a great tableland in the Upper
Andes, where Bogota, the capital of Colombia, now stands. It was "El
Dorado" who drew these explorers thither. From the Indians on the coast
they had heard stories of the great Man of Gold, who lived among the
mountains of the interior and who possessed treasure so vast that all
the wealth of the rest of the world could not equal it. Arrived in this
mysterious region, they found, not El Dorado, but a superior race of
people, somewhat like the ancient Peruvians, showing, in the barbaric
splendor of their temples and palaces, every evidence of wealth and
culture. These people, however, known as the Chibchas from their worship
of the god Chibchacum, were suspicious of the Spaniards. A war of
conquest followed, in which thousands of the natives were massacred and
their finest temples and monuments destroyed. Sajipa, the Chibcha king,
was subjected to the cruelest torture by his conquerors in their effort
to find out from him where he had hidden his treasure. But he proved
hero enough to suffer martyrdom rather than reveal the secret. For this
he was put to death, and the Spaniards contented themselves with the
trivial amount of gold and emeralds extorted from his subjects. They
then established themselves in colonies on the Plains of Bogota. The
climate was delightful, the land fertile and, as they soon discovered,
rich in minerals. From the few surviving Indians they learned some of
the native legends. In one of these, the legend of El Dorado, they
believed they had the clew to the treasure they had been seeking. This
legend was mixed up with the ancient mythology of the Chibchas, and had
played a leading part in their religious ceremonial for centuries before
the arrival of the Spaniards. It was as follows:
On the edge of the Bogota tableland, not many miles from the city that
is to-day the capital of Colombia, there is a lake, Guatavita--the
Sacred Lake of the Chibchas. Geologically, it is a pocket formed by a
cluster of spurs near the foot of a conical mountain. It is small,
circular in shape, and reaches a central depth of 214 feet. Beneath this
lake, according to tradition, lived the national god, Chibchacum. To
keep on the right side of this god, to make atonement for the people, a
semi-annual feast was observed--the Feast of El Dorado.
Twice a year the king of the Chibchas, in celebrating this Feast, was
floated on a raft to the center of the Sacred Lake. He was then stripped
of his royal robes, his body anointed with oil and covered with gold
dust. Glittering in the sunlight this Gilded Man stood at the edge of
the royal raft and was saluted by his subjects, who encircled the shores
of the lake, each one bearing an offering of gold and emeralds. Then,
as if dazzled by the splendor of their monarch, the people reverently
turned their faces away from him and, at a signal from the priests,
threw their treasures over their heads into the lake, while the Gilded
Man, followed by the heaps of precious stones and metals which were
with him on the raft, plunged into its waters. No god ever received
such a shower of wealth at his shrine as was thus lavished twice a
year, for centuries, on the god Chibchacum. All this wealth, except an
insignificant sum that the Spaniards rescued, is to-day, according to
the legend, at the bottom of Guatavita.
Besides this semi-annual tribute, it was rumored that at the time of
Sajipa's murder the entire remaining treasure of the Chibchas had been
thrown into the lake, not as a votive offering, but as a means of
hiding it from the Spaniards. It took fifty men, so runs tradition, to
carry the gold dust to Guatavita from the king's treasury alone. All
the minor chieftains of the kingdom made a similar sacrifice of their
possessions on this occasion.
Years afterwards, the Spaniards, stirred by these stories, attempted
to drain the lake. This meant the piercing of earth and rock walls
nearly nine hundred feet thick and proved too great an undertaking
for the engineering machinery that they had in those days. But before
they gave up the work they succeeded in lowering the level of the lake
sufficiently to recover a certain amount of treasure. Since that time
the secret of Guatavita has remained undisturbed. To solve it David went
to Bogota. Raoul Arthur, who had done most of the practical planning for
the expedition, went with him.
The motives of the two men engaged in the enterprise were not exactly
similar. David, according to what he told Leighton, hoped to solve
an archæological riddle and to study a hitherto lost people whose
prehistoric civilization equaled that of their neighbors, the Incas
of Peru. Arthur, on the contrary, whose fortune was still to be made,
regarded it frankly as a mining scheme that promised fabulous returns
in money, with a comparatively small amount of risk and labor. The
two points of view were not antagonistic, and for a time the friends
worked amicably enough together. In Bogota they easily secured from the
government the necessary permit to drain Guatavita. But the attractions
of the Colombian capital, the hospitality with which they were received,
delayed the actual working out of their plans. Fascinated by the romance
of this picturesque city and charmed by the unique race of mountaineers
inhabiting it, David postponed the prosaic task of mining, while Raoul
became absorbed in studies relating to their proposed venture, meeting
people with whom his companion seldom came in contact. Lake Guatavita
and its secret was thus, for a time, forgotten--at least by David.
When the social gayeties of the capital were exhausted, he took up in
earnest the work he had planned to do. He bought a full equipment of
the best mining machinery and hired a large number of laborers. But
the enterprise proved more difficult than he expected. The Spaniards,
who had worked at the problem three centuries before, were bound to
fail on account of their lack of engineering machinery. To empty Lake
Guatavita, they tried to cut through the mountain which formed one of
the containing walls of that body of water. Under the circumstances
their partial success was amazing. The V-shaped gash they cut through
the mountain is a proof of their industry, even if it failed of its full
purpose. But it did lower the level of the lake--although this result
was followed by an unforeseen catastrophe. The sudden release of the
water through the channel opened for it left the precipitous shores of
the lake unsupported. These shores then caved in, covering whatever
treasure there might be in the center of the basin with masses of rock
and earth, and thus placing a new obstacle in the way of the future
miner.
David and Raoul took the problem from a different angle. They abandoned
the old cuttings of the Spaniards and planned a tunnel through the
thinnest part of the mountain to the bottom of the lake. In this
way they hoped to control the outflow of water, after which, they
calculated, the recovery of the treasure would be a mere matter of
placer mining. To do this they had boring machines and dynamite--modern
giants, of whose existence the old Spaniards never dreamed.
As a first test of the existence of treasure in the lake, native divers
explored some of the shallow places near the shore. A few ancient gold
images were thus secured, enough to corroborate the legend regarding
Guatavita. These images were curiously carved. One represented a small
human figure seated in a sort of sedan chair. Another was a heart-shaped
breastplate upon which were embossed human faces and various emblems.
Others were statuettes, rude likenesses, probably, of those who threw
them into the lake as votive offerings.
These gold tokens spurred on the miners. Work on the tunnel was rushed,
and a subterranean passage, several hundred feet in length, directed
to a point just below the bottom of the lake, was soon completed. Then
a peculiarly hard rock formation was reached that the boring machines
could not pierce. To overcome it, dynamite was used.
"Since dynamite was one of the final words in your test," said David,
in telling his story to Leighton, "you know that its use in our venture
brings the climax of my mining experience. How to explain this climax to
you--or to myself--is beyond me.
"When we decided to use dynamite in our excavations, a long fuse was
laid from the tunnel's entrance to the unyielding wall at the other
end. There this fuse was connected with a dynamite charge placed in the
crevice of the rock to be destroyed. Raoul, waiting to set off the fuse,
remained at the opening of the tunnel. I was at the further end, looking
after the laying of the dynamite. As I started for the entrance, I was
a little behind the others. The latter no sooner gained the outer air
than a muffled roar shook the tunnel. The ground swayed, the terrific
concussion of air seemed to rend my very brain, and I fell unconscious."
David's story came abruptly to an end. Pale and listless, wearied by
the effort to give a coherent account of his experiences, he looked
hopelessly at Leighton.
"Well," said the latter, "what then?"
"If I could only tell you!"
"Surely, you remember something--there is some clew----"
"Nothing! Just--darkness."
"Some faint flashes here and there--glimpses of people, scenes, a house,
a street--the sound of voices, a word----?"
"Nothing!"
"Try to remember."
"No use. I've tried it too often. It's all a blank. I thought, for
an instant, that in your psychometer test the veil would be lifted.
Instead--as you know--I went to pieces."
"Very well," said Leighton reassuringly, "let us go back to your story.
You were in the tunnel when the dynamite went off. You were thrown to
the ground; you lost consciousness. What is the next step in memory?"
"Wait," said David slowly. "The explosion was on the ninth of May. The
date was indelibly fixed in my mind; I have verified it since. When I
recovered consciousness----"
"You mean, your normal consciousness," interjected Leighton.
"Very well. When I came to myself, then, it was on the morning of the
fifth of August."
"Nearly three months afterwards," ruminated the old man. "You found
yourself----?"
"Seated in a chair, in a room in a strange house in Bogota."
"Alone?"
"Raoul Arthur was with me. He was bending over me, his eyes fixed on
mine, making passes with his hand before my face."
"You were in a hypnotic trance."
"I was coming out of one apparently."
"It would be hard to define your condition. Of course, after the
explosion you had been picked up and carried to this house in Bogota,
where you had remained, suffering from a severe nervous shock--perhaps
concussion of the brain--for three months."
"I had been in that house scarcely an hour before my memory was suddenly
revived."
"How do you know that?" demanded Leighton sharply.
"The rainy season was on in August in Bogota. I found myself in my
riding dress. My rubber poncho, dripping with rain, was on the floor. My
boots, the spurs still attached to the heels, were caked with mud."
"And Arthur told you----?"
"At first, I was bewildered, as one is when suddenly aroused from a long
sleep. With full return of consciousness, I asked Raoul how I came to be
there. He said he didn't know."
"He must have given some explanation."
"Very little. What he said mystified me more than ever. He declared that
a short time before a messenger had come saying that I was in the house,
waiting for him."
"Whose house was it?"
"Raoul's. He had rented it two months before and was living in it alone
with two servants who were running it for him."
"And this messenger----?"
"An Indian, whom neither of us saw or heard of again, although we
inquired high and low."
"The servants must have had information to give?"
"On being questioned they said I had arrived that morning on horseback,
with an Indian, who left me there. This Indian was probably the
messenger who informed Raoul of my arrival, and who afterwards
disappeared. My horse was tethered in the courtyard."
"The clews seem to have been pretty well obliterated," remarked Leighton
sarcastically. "But Arthur must have been able to shed some light on the
affair."
"He said that when he found me, I did not recognize him and was in
a sort of dazed mental state. Then he tried hypnotism. He had often
hypnotized me before that, and was thus familiar with my condition while
in a trance. Well, as soon as he saw me, after my long disappearance, he
declared that I showed every symptom of hypnotic trance. So, he at once
tried the usual method for bringing me back to a normal condition--and
with complete success."
"In his report Arthur emphasizes that as the singular feature of the
case. His account, so far as it goes, agrees with yours. It gives the
facts of the explosion, how you were supposed to be killed, how you
disappeared for three months, and how, when you were found, you were in
a trance from which he awakened you."
"Does he say that, on coming out of the trance, I could remember nothing
that happened during those three months?"
"Yes."
"Well, there's the whole case. You know all that I do about it."
"All that Raoul Arthur knows?"
"All that he says he knows."
"Ah, then you have your doubts?"
"Just a suspicion. I have a feeling that he could tell more about my
disappearance than he chose to tell."
"Why did you leave him?"
"I left Bogota the day after I came out of the trance. My distrust
of Raoul and the horror that I felt for everything connected with my
mysterious experience, made my stay there more than I could stand.
But we parted friends, and I've sent him money to go on with the
excavations. How he's getting on I can't tell you. I've lost my interest
in El Dorado. I won't visit Bogota again."
For some minutes Leighton paced up and down the shadowy room. Then he
stopped, with the air of one who has reached a decision.
"Our course is plain," he announced.
"I've tried everything; there's nothing to be done," said the other
hopelessly.
"David, you've missed the obvious thing," was the emphatic reply. "We
must go to Bogota."
"Go to Bogota!"
"You and I will face Arthur together. If he knows anything more
about this matter, he's bound to tell us. If he doesn't know--if your
suspicions are groundless--we'll solve the mystery of those three months
some other way. And perhaps we'll stumble upon your Gilded Man at the
same time," he added with a chuckle.
"And Una----?"
"She has a way of deciding things for herself. For all I know she may
want to go with us."
"Would you consent?"
"There's no reason against it. In a ghost hunt a woman's wit may help."
"Very well, then," said David, new energy in his words and manner.
"You agree?"
"I am entirely in your hands."
"Then we'll take up our interesting little experiment again in the land
of El Dorado--and this time we'll run it out to the end."
"Without a psychometer, I hope," said David.
VI
EMBOLADORES ON THE MARCH
There is in Bogota a street, the Calle de Las Montanas, that meanders
down from the treeless foothills of the gray mountain ridge overlooking
the city, and broadens out into a respectable thoroughfare before losing
itself in the plaza upon which, facing each other diagonally, stand the
venerable Catedral de Santa Fe and the National Capitol. This street,
resembling the bed of a mountain stream, in the first half mile of
its course runs through a huddle of lowly houses whose thatched roofs
and white adobe walls seldom reach more than one story in height. The
inhabitants of this district are called, in playful irony, by their more
prosperous neighbors, "paisanos," fellow-citizens; or else, scornful of
compliment, "peons," day-laborers. Here dwell the teamsters of the city,
the washerwomen, the tinkers, the runners, the street-sweepers, the
beggars, the proprietors of small tiendas, the bootblacks, the vendors
of sweets--a mixed army of workers and idlers, who gain a livelihood, as
chance favors, by their hands or their wits.
The peon of Colombia is an interesting possibility. He is more Indian
than Spanish, but he has developed certain novelties of feature that
belong to neither of these parent races. He has something of the
savagery of the one, and the romance of the other; yet he is quite
unlike Spaniard or Indian, and when these have disappeared from the
mountain republic the peon will take their place. To-day he lacks the
energy needed for self-assertion. There have been occasions, however,
when this peasant of the Andes has taken the lead in a popular uprising
and, although he has usually failed to win what he was after, his
reserve of power promises well for the future of his race.
It was the politically awakened peon who was in evidence on a certain
morning in Bogota, not so very long ago, at the upper end of the Calle
de Las Montanas. The sign of his awakening was to be seen in an unusual
commotion among the good-natured "paisanos" of the street, from which
an onlooker might reach the astonishing conclusion that some sort of
"demonstration" was under way. Revolutionary or otherwise, there are
people, it would seem, who engage in these affairs simply through a
desire for sociability. Their warlike declarations are really not
unamiable. An Andean revolution, indeed, may not be more terrifying
than a "fiesta," and is never so noisy. In either case, these people
make common cause of their joys or their grievances; and it was
unquestionably a sudden burst of neighborliness that brought the
inhabitants of the Calle de Las Montanas together on this particular
morning.
An army of bootblacks was assembled in the middle of the street. Bogota,
ancient seat of the Muyscas, City of the Mountains, is, for some unknown
reason, rich in bootblacks. Hence, it was not surprising to find a
hundred or more knights of the brush and bottle mustered here. They
were of varying age and size, clad in nondescript rags, over which
protectingly flapped the ruana, or poncho, a garment inherited from the
Indians, and now universally worn in Spanish America. War's ordinary
weapons were lacking in this tattered regiment. Instead of sword and
musket each youngster carried in front of him, hanging from his neck,
a rude box containing the bottles and brushes needed in his calling.
Ordinarily these weapons are harmless enough; but these volunteer
soldiers felt that they were adequately armed for whatever adventure
might be in the wind. Patriotism--and a ruana--can start any revolution.
In expert hands, the vicious twirl of a ruana should bring terror to the
most stalwart of foes--and of patriotism there was a generous supply
this morning in the Calle de Las Montanas.
Pedro Cavallo, a wiry youth, taller than his fellows, gifted with shrill
eloquence, acrobatic gestures, and hence acclaimed the King of the
Bootblacks, was the leading spirit of the throng surrounding him.
"Viva Pedro! Por la Patria! Por la Patria! Baja los puercos!" shouted
first one and then another in answer to his orders given with all the
assurance of royalty.
"Compadres!" he addressed them, switching his cumbersome box of blacking
to one side with oratorical cunning; "we will lead the way! We will
march to the palace! We will offer ourselves to the President! We will
march to the coast, and then we will sweep out the Yankees!"
"Si! Si!" they shrilled in eager response. "Por la Patria! Por la
Patria! Mata los Yankees puercos!"
A quizzical spectator, a true Bogotano, robust and red-cheeked, swathed
in an ample ruana, echoed the enthusiasm.
"It is an army of emboladores!" he shouted sonorously. "Let the Yankee
bull beware!"
Now, "embolador," although it is a word familiarly used in Bogota to
designate a bootblack, has for its first meaning "one who puts balls on
the tips of a bull's horns," a thing not easy to accomplish, requiring,
as it does, the conquest of a traditionally warlike animal. Applied to
this Falstaffian army of bootblacks, the irony of the term was broad
enough to delight the bystanders, at the same time that it flattered the
vanity of those for whom it was intended.
Distances meant little to the emboladores. No matter how far they had to
travel, they vowed they would keep going until they met "los Yankees."
And, when they did meet them, they had no doubt of what would happen.
Confident in their own ability to put the "usurpers" to flight, they had
the sympathy of the peons surrounding them.