CHAPTER XV--HOW I BEHELD A MIRACLE
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 G.o.d who made them all, and me as well. For I was one with them, even these little living things of the endless wilderness, encompa.s.sed 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 gra.s.sland, 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 bra.s.s 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 d.i.c.k Treadgold, and my home lay far away, upon the Suss.e.x sh.o.r.e. 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 circ.u.mstantial 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 G.o.ds--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 doc.u.ment 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_.