Treasure of Kings Part 7

"I've not lived my life and done my duty," said he, "without making friends. One of the crew, of the name of Adams, to whom I have been of service in the past, has let me loose--just as you might unchain a yard-dog for a run. I have a few minutes at the best before I'm back in irons, but that's enough for what I have to say."

"But where are you now?" I asked, for he appeared to me to be walking upon the sea.

He explained that he was hanging on to a rope, made fast to a stanchion on the deck above, but that he had something of greater importance to tell me.

"Are we near our journey's end?" I asked.

"In three days," he answered, "we should sight the coast, unless the wind changes. What they intend to do with me at Caracas I neither know nor care. I will somehow find the means to escape, and make my way back to England; and then, Captain Dagg and Amos Baverstock shall pay for what they've done."

"I entreat you," I exclaimed, "do not meddle with Amos!"

Rushby laughed softly.

"And leave you at his mercy!" he cried. "That's not my way, nor--I should think, if all you have told me be the truth--the way of Mr.

Bannister. This matter shall never rest where it now stands. I am here to learn two things, though I am no better than a simple sailor, and it will want a wiser head than mine before we're safe in port. Come, tell me, lad, where did you hide the map you s.n.a.t.c.hed from Baverstock? John Bannister may want it."

"In a rabbit-hole," said I; and I went on to describe, as best I could, how that rabbit-hole might be found.

"There's a warren," said I, "about two hundred yards to the west of Bannister's cabin----"

"And how am I to find that?" Rushby took me up.

I thought for a moment; and then I got a bright idea when most I needed it, for I realised there was little time to spare and that Amos, at any moment, might enter and find Rushby at the port-hole.

I gave him my mother's address; for I had little doubt that Bannister had gone, long before this, to her. With my life in danger, he would--I knew--soon get the better of his natural dread of women.

"That's all I want," said he.

And a moment after he was gone. It so happened that many months were to elapse before I set eyes upon him again--a true man and an honest, big of heart and strong of hand, the type that has made the very name of British sailor to rank so highly all the world across, from the old three-decker to the battle-cruiser of to-day. And I speak of the men without whose cutla.s.ses and courage Blake and Drake, or even Nelson himself, had never been the famous admirals that they were.

For, when we were come to Caracas, I was discharged from that poisonous vessel like a worthless bale of freight. Uns.h.i.+pped by night into a broken-down two-wheeled cart, and conveyed through the narrow streets of an evil-smelling city, where men talked loudly in a foreign tongue, with quarrelsome voices and much waving of the hands, and then I found myself in a dirty hovel upon the slopes of tree-clad hills, where I could see the round moon through a great hole in the roof, and lie listening to the singing of millions of crickets, wondering what would be the end of it all.

CHAPTER VIII--INTO THE WILDERNESS

For these few days, it happened that I was left in the charge of Joshua Trust. In other words, he was the watch-dog that guarded me, day and night; and a dull dog he was. He never opened his mouth, save to grumble at everything--the heat, the insects, the very food he cooked himself. Now and again, he would sigh; which puzzled me, until I solved the problem for myself: he was inclined to regret the idle days aboard the _Mary Greenfield_ when he had naught to think about except his grog and cards.

So, in this man's company, I learned nothing concerning what was afoot.

But I was free to use my eyes, and I could scarce fail to observe that they were turning by degrees that ruined habitation into a kind of depot. For, day and night, came stores and arms and ammunition to the place--all manner of such things as might be required upon an expedition into the wild hinterland of that strange country, where there were few roads, but many bridle-paths and broad rivers to be crossed.

Amos came often to the hut, and Mr. Forsyth was always with him; and, as I knew, it was the last-named who had paid for all. That, however, was all one to me. I was safely caught, thousands of miles from dear, silly Suss.e.x; and even if I was so fortunate as to escape from Joshua Trust, what was I to do in that foreign land, where I could not speak a word of the language and had no friend to whom to go?

On the fourth day of my captivity came six mules, and with them three men whom I took to be half-castes of a sort, for they were no more than two parts black and spoke Spanish, shouting at one another when they conversed. But I was more interested in the mules, which were of a kind that I had never seen before; for they were small animals, little larger than donkeys, with mouse-grey woolly coats like sheep. Each of these was provided with a pack-saddle; and when they were loaded for the inspection of Amos Baverstock and Forsyth, I was amazed at the great weight that such slender and seemingly fragile beasts could carry.

On the fifth day after we had left the s.h.i.+p, we set forth upon our great march towards the south. Our party numbered eight in all: Amos, Forsyth, and Trust (the first the acknowledged leader of the expedition); myself and the three mulemen, whilst the other was a guide--a lean, cadaverous Spaniard, black as a raven, whom I never heard called by any other name than that of Vasco. I do not think this fellow was an evil man by nature, except in so far as he was capable of doing almost anything for money. In that, at any rate, he was honest: he served his masters faithfully, no matter who they were.

And now we come to the march itself that, step by step, led me farther and farther from the confines of civilisation and into the heart of a cruel and magic wilderness where things happened that I should not believe, had I not seen them with my eyes.

The first stage of our journey was uneventful enough; and the scenery--especially on the mountains we were obliged to cross--surprisingly beautiful. We first climbed to a great height, following a zig-zag road, along which the little mules struggled gallantly with their heavy loads. I had thought that, on gaining the crestline, we must again descend to something approaching the level of the sea. But this was not so; for the mountains proved to consist of a series of parallel chains, and no sooner had we negotiated one valley than we found ourselves upon the watershed of another.

These valleys were thickly populated. We were seldom out of sight of villages and towns, many of which contained considerable buildings. The country had the aspect of being extremely fertile and prosperous. There were plantations of coffee and cocoa, tobacco and cotton, but a far greater area of the valley regions was given over to the cultivation of manioc and maize. For all I could ever learn, there was no flour in the land, for I never tasted bread, but subsisted upon hot maize cakes, made by Vasco, the guide, which I found as good as hot-cross buns.

When we were clear of the mountains, we began to descend into the valley of a great river which, had I learned more geography when I was at school, I would have known to be the Orinoco. The course of this great stream we followed for many days, marching in a south-westerly direction, against the current. The climate was now a great deal hotter than it had been near the coast, and towns and villages were few and far between. One thing that I observed was the courteous behaviour of the inhabitants, who seldom failed to wave their hands to us and pa.s.s the time of day.

We came to a vast sea of gra.s.s where, here and there, were scattered woods; and finally, after crossing a river of some importance, a tributary of the Orinoco, we sighted a great mountain that overtopped the surrounding hills like a giant in the midst of pygmies.

Amos, who had been unusually reticent upon the line-of-march, now became talkative, almost hilarious. He carried constantly a grin upon his fox-like countenance, and would often chuckle to himself.

For the great mountain in front of us might be described as the gateway of the road to the Treasure we were seeking, and was marked upon the left-hand top corner of the map. It was called Mount Tigro, but by that name I have never been able to trace it upon any modern map, though it was shown to be about twenty miles south of the Rio Guaviare.

We were now--though I did not know it at the time--close upon the frontier of Colombia, and, I think, for a time our route lay through that little-known country, until we turned eastward again into the territories of the Amazonas.

We were now in a mountainous and savage land, where we could make but the slowest progress. For not only were the hills steep and pathless, but in places clothed in such luxuriant vegetation that we had often to break a way with hatchets for the mules.

We were marching by the map, and Amos had become our guide. He and Forsyth--who never seemed to tire--would lead our little column, myself walking in company of Joshua, and the pack-mules bringing up the rear.

We were soon to bid good-bye to these faithful, dumb companions; for, after we had climbed the slopes of another range of mountains, we followed the course of a river valley that led us rapidly downward, to land us into the very heart of such a forest as I did not dream to be possible.

The mulemen were paid off--by no means too handsomely, I thought--to return upon that long and tedious journey to the coast. And we five went on alone--Amos and his two confederates, Vasco and myself--carrying our stores and provisions in knapsacks on our backs, and all armed as though we were like to meet with savage men.

In the first place, I must tell you that the heat was insufferable, for all this while we had been approaching the equator. The forest swarmed with myriads of stinging insects, and sometimes I saw great tree snakes of a magnitude that even now makes my blood run cold when I think of them. We came upon one, lying half coiled upon the bank of a woodland pool, and I am ready to swear that he was longer than a cricket-pitch, and of a thickness almost equal to my own waist.

But I marvelled most at the forest trees, the names of some of which I learned from Vasco, who had a little English, of which he was exceedingly vain. One of these was a palm-tree, the very leaves of which were forty feet in length, standing almost erect, all bunched together--a magnificent sight to behold. And these forest giants were intertwined and intermingled with thousands of creepers, parasites, and climbers, so that in places, even at mid-day, when the tropic sun was at its height, it was dark as night in the vast Region of the Woods.

For weeks we struggled onward, literally fighting our way through that all but impenetrable wilderness. I saw that Amos had more than he could do to trace our route upon the map; and there were times, I am convinced, when even Vasco and Baverstock himself truly believed that we were lost.

He told us he was looking for a certain landmark; and in that dark and endless forest he might as well have searched for a pin. At one time, there was not a living soul within hundreds of miles of us. There were great alligators in the rivers that we crossed by means of rough dug-out canoes, which we made upon one bank and left upon the other; the jungle teemed with snakes, many of the venomous kind besides the great loathsome pythons, in whose coils an ox might have been crushed to death; thousands of gaily-coloured birds were among the tree-tops high above us, and the dead leaves about our pathway swarmed with little things that crept and crawled and stung so vilely that we were covered from head to foot with painful swellings. But never a sign did we see of any human being. Nature reigned in that black wilderness, untrammelled and supreme.

And then, as one steps on a sudden from a darkened room, we came forth one morning from the forest into the blazing light of the sun. And there was such a wonder as I had never seen before.

Before us was a plain upon which was growing a tall, reed-like gra.s.s; and in the centre of this plain was a long, hog-backed hillock, bare of trees. Remember, we were in the very heart of the Unknown, for months we had seen no sign or trace of humanity, and I, at least, judged myself to be hundreds of miles from the very outposts of the civilised world; and yet, upon the summit of this hillock was a great ruined palace or a temple, encircled by a colonnade of vast stone pillars, no less in their proportions than those of Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in England, only they were there by the score, and stood perpendicular and ma.s.sive, not one having fallen from its place.

I stood rooted in amazement, when my attention was attracted by Amos, whose behaviour was now that of a madman. He threw both his arms into the air, which action--in view of his hunched back and his pig-like, glittering eyes--made him look more evil and gleeful than ever, and shouted at the top of his voice:

"Found!" he cried. "The Temple of Cahazaxa, who fled from Cuzco with the Treasure! And now, boy, the matter rests with you!"

He changed as in a flash from unbounded joy to pa.s.sion. He seized me by the shoulders, gripping me so tightly that it was as if his fingers burned into my flesh like red-hot irons.

"I'll have the truth from you!" he shrieked, dancing like a maniac on his feet. "The truth, and nothing but the truth! Or else, I swear as I'm a living man, you die here and now."

"What truth?" I asked.

My voice was trembling; for so terrible did the man seem that a cold sweat had broken out upon my forehead. He drew nearer to me still, peering into my face and whispering.

"Henceforward," said he, "you guide us. Either you have seen the map or Bannister has told you all he knows. In any case, you guide us from here to the place where the Greater Treasure is hid. Refuse, and you die, here and now, in the midst of this almighty desert."