Part 1
Chapter
| 1 | A Stranger to Manaos |
| 2 | Amerogo Tells an Unlikely Tale |
| 3 | Into the Unknown Land |
| 4 | The First Check |
| 5 | On the Roof of the Forest World |
| 6 | A Bird's-eye View |
| 7 | Duel Among the Trees |
| 8 | Duel Preludes Duet |
| 9 | Juanita Explains |
| 10 | The Tree-Cave |
| 11 | An Idea: And Juanita Thereon |
| 12 | Search in the Night |
| 13 | The Pit |
| 14 | Conflict at the Pit |
| 15 | But which way Now? |
Part 2
| 1 | The Forest Ends |
| 2 | Peixoto's Land |
| 3 | "The Tale is True" |
| 4 | Primeval Forest |
| 5 | The Greeting upon the Quay |
| 6 | The Inca Receives |
| 7 | Happenings in the Night |
| 8 | Jiros Intervenes |
| 9 | The Treasure |
| 10 | A Price too High? |
| 11 | Treason - to Whom? |
| 12 | "About the Girl" |
| 13 | Juanita Comes |
| 14 | A Plan of Flight |
| 15 | The Audience Hall |
| 16 | Juanita Hears Kito's Views |
| 17 | Climax for Juanita |
| 18 | The Water that Others Drink |
| 19 | Prelude to Death |
| 20 | Screams in the Night |
| 21 | The Last of Juanita |
PART I
CHAPTER I
A STRANGER TO MANAOS
DEVEREUX sat at one of the small round tables that were at the rear end of the cafe and endeavoured to eat as though he were both unhurried and unconcerned, though his heart beat at times in a way that was hard to still. He thought, with some doubtful confidence, of the revolver his pocket held, and with less satisfaction of the fact that the short twilight was near, and that he would have to return to his hotel through streets which would have no more light than would come from the tropic moon.
The man he had knocked down sat with his three companions at one of the larger tables nearer the door. His left hand at times would rub a reddened cheekbone; his right would feel the haft of his knife in a furtively restless way. The girl, at the sound of whose screams Devereux had so foolishly interfered, sat on the knee of the man further away, a loose-limbed angular man, very black of hair and eyes, and with a sun-darkened mahogany skin. Like the others, she glanced across the room at him at times, but with dislike rather than any gratitude in the curiosity of her bold, contemptuous eyes. He wondered whether it would be a signal for their attack if he should rise, and move to the door. Or was his fear that of a nervous stranger, who exaggerated the perils of foreign streets? Was it more likely that they would scowl at him, and let him go? Or would they follow till they could close around him in a quiet place, and make an end of him which none would see? Or perhaps use their knowledge of the town to go ahead, and ambush him from a shadowed porch, with a sudden rush, or no need of more than a well-thrown knife? He felt, in imagination, the sharp blade sink into his neck. He staggered forward while he strove to hold in the blood with impotent hands. He fell, gaining oblivion as rough hands tore at his pockets to take the spoils that the victors claim. . . . It was foolish to sit here, while the shadows lengthened outside. It was cowardice to delay to test the event. Or should he speak to the proprietor at the bar (an ill-favoured man, but whose rapid curses had held them back from him before), asking if he could telephone for protection from the police?
It might be wise, but he knew it was what he would never do. It might make him look a most utter fool! No, he would sit there while his courage went, but he must rise at last, to face that which could be proved in no other way.
Whatever his fears might invent, there was one thing which he did not mistake. They were still looking at him, and he was sure that he engaged their thoughts and that he was the subject of some disputation among them, in which it seemed that the man who was nursing the girl urged something upon the others which they did not quickly accept, though his gesture was that of one who had authority, or advantage of status over those others to whom he spoke.
It was even as Devereux resolved to test the peril in which he stood that the man tipped the girl somewhat casually from his lap, and came over to the little table at which he sat.
He pulled out a chair for his own use, and sat down unasked. "I tell Pedro," he said, "that you are a stranger for all to see. You are of Europe, not here. You have not our ways. The girl is a sly thief, who would be better for harder blows. But in Manaos we have easy ways. Will you drink with me, that they may see that the thing is done?"
Devereux looked at a man whom he could not like, but who spoke better words than he had expected to hear. His appearance did not encourage confidence. In London he would have been one to avoid, a man self-advertised of the criminal class. But the standards of Manaos were doubtless different, and must be Iearnt by one who sought to thrive in a strange land.
The man did not appear to be lacking in intelligence. He had had the sense to use slow clear words, so that he had been easy to understand. Devereux, whose Portuguese had been learned in an Oxford Street language-school, and who had landed at Rio no more than three weeks before, was still puzzled by rapid speech, though he had been told that he had mastered the language well.
He might distrust the character of the man who sat opposite to him, or the sincerity of the goodwill that his words implied, but it would he foolish to show any sign of doubt. If peace could be bought at the price of a drink, it would be little to pay.
He signalled to a waiter who had approached in a diffident manner, as though being as uncertain as Devereux himself of the purpose with which he had been accosted. The man said no more till his glass was filled, when he raised it with a courteous gesture. "Señor," he said, "I am Manuel Fonseca, at your service. I drink to your prosperity in a pleasant land."
They were amicable, and very apposite words. It was prosperity which Devereux sought, as a man must who finds himself an outcast from his own country, and obliged to look for a new foothold of life in lands where he will be hard to follow, and which must therefore be hardly tolerable to man. Also, he re-minded himself, he must not refuse opportunity to make acquaintance of other men, if he were to explore the possibilities of these outliers of civilisation to which he came. The blend of caution and enterprise that was in the mixed ancestry of his blood ruled his reply.
"Señor," he said, "my name is Devereux Carsholt. I am English, as you may have guessed, and a stranger, as it was easy for you to see. If I blundered, will you do me the great favour to express my regret to Señor Pedro in better words than I should be able to choose?"
He spoke with an inward doubt of how this apology would be received. Was it deficient in the words of courtesy which were so freely used in this land, and in excess of the meaning they seemed to bear? Might it not be a fresh offence to ask Fonseca to be the medium of their transmission? Was it a case where a gift of money would be considered a more appropriate solatium for a bruised head? Or perhaps a more deadly affront? Looking at Pedro, it might be though that such a man could have little sensitiveness to wounds, and little honour to lose. But that was to judge him by English standards, on which it would be unsafe to rely.
But whether appropriate or not, the apology was graciously received.
"Señor, they see us drink. It is done. Do you come to Manaos, may I ask, of pleasure, or for business affairs?"
"I have no business here. I am looking round."
"It is a land where there is much to see. It is so near the unknown."
"I have been told that the Amazon had now been traversed many times for its whole length, and that there are stations along its banks."
"Many times? It is less than that. But the river, and its great branches, yes. There is Iquitos, which is no less than a town. You will have come nine hundred miles from Rio to here. You will go thirteen hundred more, and you will come to Iquitos, which has a pier. There you might find a cargo-boat from your own land lying tied to the quay. You may say the great rivers are known, but if you go ten miles in the forests to right or left you will be in an unknown land which you will be first to see, though I do not say you will see far."
"I suppose the growth is too dense?"
"So you will find. But beyond that? Men may suppose it the same. Yet they may make no more than a bad guess. It is unknown for a million miles."
"A million miles?" Devereux found it hard to control the incredulity of his voice, though he was helped thereto by a prudent doubt of whether Manuel might not be aiming to pick a quarrel with him, the cause of which would have a better sound than that he had interfered to protect a loud-screaming girl. Was he to be led to make remarks disparaging to Brazil, and then to be beaten up, if not worse, by patriotic Manaos citizens, who could not endure the English stranger's supercilious contempt of their native soil?
But Manuel showed no sign of offence. "A million miles?" he replied. "Yes. I do not mean stretched in a straight line. I mean square. A million square miles of an unvisited land. There is more than that. You could cut that out, and there would yet be a great country remaining. In such a space there must be wonders we do not know!"
"I have supposed," Devereux replied, "that it is all a dense, hot forest, level and low, which becomes swamp when the rains fall, or at the melting of the snow in the great mountains in which its rivers begin."
"That is the common guess. It is little more. Is it likely that what we see on the river's bank will go on and on for so great a space? Is not the earth made in another way, changing ever its face as the miles extend? If I were not tied here as I am, I would seek that which may be as strange as Columbus found."
"But there must be many who are not tied. If it be as you say, which I do not doubt," - the last words were spoken in hurried correction, lest there might be an opportunity for resentment in those that had gone before - "why do they not explore the wonders of this great land which is theirs, and from which wealth might be won which is hard to guess?"
Fonseca cast his hands apart in a gesture which was new to Devereux, but easy to understand. "Señor, it is plain to see that you have come to a land that you do not know. It is tomorrow, always it is tomorrow with us. If we have food in store, or money to buy a meal, or bananas grown on a small patch, we are hard to stir. We would lie in the sun. In the evening, we spear a fish, or it may be two. Why, there are settlements on the river banks that are short of food, though the soil will give them three crops a year, and there are fish to catch, and in the forest are many creatures to shoot or snare.
"They clear small patches to plant, and lie about as men whose work is soon done, and the forest, that does not rest either night or day, overgrows and chokes them again. They play no more than a game that the forest wins."
"Yet I have been told that the work is hard in the rubber plantations that are farther up the river?"
"So it is. But they are Indians working there. It is so hard that they die. It is no work for us who have whiter blood. Yet you will understand that they die. It is a land where men make little effort to do more than their mouths require; and, being driven, they die. . . . Why even the great treasure of Ixitol, the place of which is set down on a map which may be inspected by all who will, has been unclaimed for three hundred years."
"I suppose there are many tales of buried treasure which are either ill-founded, or hard to locate?"
"So there are. But that of Ixitol is of a different kind, nor do I know that it was said to be buried at all. But if you would become rich in an easy way, you should go to the Library of San José, where the map is open to all. If you ask of Señor Amerigo, the librarian there, he will tell you that which is no less true because it took place on a distant day, and you may think his words to be more weighty than mine."
Devereux thanked him politely for this information, but put the idea aside with a smile such as most men would give to so vague a tale. He said, with reason, that treasure-seeking of any kind was for those who knew the country better than he.
Señor Fonseca approved a prudent reply. He said it was not to be expected that strangers would attempt that which the natives were disposed to avoid. Life was different in the days when Peixoto lived, by whom the treasure was found. He could look back on Cortes and Pizarro, and a score of other adventurers in untrodden ways, as men who were scarcely dead, and whose spirits brooded over the land. Emptying his glass, Fonseca rose, and with sufficient courtesies of Ieave-taking returned to the table where his companions were still seated.
Devereux, vaguely puzzled though he was, had lost the fear of immediate violence or ambush which had possessed him before. He rose also, and passed out to the wide, untidy street upon which the darkness already fell. As he swung open the door, he looked sideways at the seated group. He saw that Pedro's eyes were following him with a malevolent glance, that had yet the satisfied look of one who had found the revenge he sought. The girl was again on Fonseca's knee, and he could see no more of her than the back of a head of hair that curled, glossy, abundant, black, and bedecked with draggled and dying flowers.
Why, he asked himself, had he entered so dubious a door? Well, the meals at his highly-recommended hotel had seemed to him to be neither wholesome nor very cleanly prepared. And, when one is wandering about, it is better to go out than to stay inside. He had no better reason than that.
He could not hear Fonseca say, as the door closed: "He would not show he was caught, but he bit - he bit. He will fix the hook in his gills. You may count him dead in an evil way, and one for which there will be no charges to us, nor any questions to turn aside."
"So it may be," Pedro grumbled, feeling his cheek-bone again, "but it would have been better to see him die."
CHAPTER II
AMERIGO TELLS AN UNLIKELY TALE
THE heat was not very great. In the Amazon valley it seldom is, as it is seldom cool. It is a land where sunstroke is never known. But for four midday hours Manaos sleeps in the sun.
It was three-fifteen, and Manaos was barely stretching itself awake for the hours of the afternoon, which would be busy enough, for it is a place of commerce, and loaded wharves, standing where rivers meet, and gathering the grudging tribute the forest pays for two thousand ascending miles.
Devereux, having become impatient for a call which he felt it would be foolish to make, came down a wide white street that was still empty of more life than a drowsing dog, between buildings some of which were substantial enough in the newest styles that Southern Europe prefers, and others little better than iron-roofed sheds, until he came to the library of San José, where he had resolved to enquire concerning the treasure Peixoto found, not as a matter with which he would have further concern, but so that he should be able to think of more practical things.
It was not sense that there should be public knowledge for three hundred years of a great treasure that no man took, or that he, a stranger to the unknown land and its difficult ways, should be able to win that which those who knew more would not attempt. Men were too keen on treasure for that!
In fact, it was this bizarre quality of the tale which had been most potent to vex his mind. He thought at times that Manuel Fonseca (a man it was most easy to doubt) had caught him with foolish talk, making game of one whose ignorance invited a jest. But he did not think him to be of that kind, but rather one who took life in a serious, though it might also be a sinister mood. . . . Well, the simplest course was to ask, when there would doubtless be sufficient reason shown to put it out of his mind. He had read tales enough, either invented or true, of treasure shown upon secret maps, which were given by dying hands, or perhaps pilfered from dying men, and would then be cozened from hand to hand by ways of bargain or blood, until men came, by paces and Signs, to a place of bones and a rifled hole. All that was common enough, be it truth or lies. But a tale of treasure the location of which was a public talk, and which no one took - ! Well, a librarian should be likely to give a courteous reply to a stranger who would ask in a civil tone, even though the question should have little meaning or none, from a man who had been misled.
Señor Amerigo was a small man, wizened and bald, with a beard trimmed to a point, very white on his walnut skin. He had eyes which were bright and black, denying his years, which could not be few. He walked slowly, with little ease, having the infirmity of shortened and twisted leg.
He received Mr. Carsholt with a formal courtesy that became sincere when he learnt that he was a graduate of an English college, and found that he possessed a better knowledge of Portuguese than most Englishmen can display. The library he controlled was not large, but it contained old and curious books which the early settlers had brought to the land, some of which might not be easily duplicated in the Europe from which they came, and other records, manuscripts and books, that had been produced in the four hundred years that the Portuguese had possessed the coast and the river banks of Brazil, which was little less than they did at the present day. These Señor Amerigo was more than willing to show to anyone with intelligence to appreciate and scholarship to understand what they were; but when Devereux said: "Have you anything which relates to an old treasure that a man named Peixoto is said to have discovered three hundred years back?" his expression changed, as though he had been suddenly asked a question of an unexpectedly personal kind.
"Who," he asked in return, "could have told you of that? It has been mentioned to me but once in the last twenty years, and it meant death then, as I suppose that it ever will."
Devereux saw by this reply that there was at least some truth in Fonseca's tale, and that of a serious kind. "I understood," he replied, "that it was a public matter that all might learn."
"So it is. But it is not one which I would show to a friend, or to any I did not hate. . . . It is by that tale that I walk as I do now, having had great fortune in that, though, at the time, I looked at it another way. But that is long past. . . . It was no more than two years ago that it took tribute again, which was the evil work of one, Manuel Fonseca, who so had his revenge on a foe that he would not kill in a straighter way, there being some law in this city, from which it would be his ruin to flee, who is merchant here both of known and illicit wares."
Devereux heard a warning in these words he could not miss. Nor could he doubt that Amerigo spoke as a friend. He became frank. "I had the tale from the same mouth."
"It was a probable guess. What harm had you done to him?"
"Nothing at all. I had knocked down a man, Pedro, who kicked a girl. I was most likely a fool. After that, she found a place on Fonseca's knee."
"You were unwise. There are many Pedros in this city. They are common as stones. I cannot say who was the man you struck. But it is clear that Fonseca gave him revenge in a way that would cheat the law. You will be wise if you ask no more."
"I am warned, as you say. I must thank your kindness for that. But it will do no harm if I hear the tale."
"So I must hope. And you appear to be of a stable mind. But men have heard it before who have gone to death though I have warned them, as I am warning you. Do you drink mate?"
"No. No one does in England. Till I landed in Rio I did not know what it was."
"So I have heard. I enquired whether you had learned its use since you landed here."
"No. To be frank, it is a taste I have not sought to acquire."
"Well, you should. It is more potent than tea, and it is said that it is less harmful to drink. But it is a taste you must learn. If you will join me in that, you shall have the tale."
"It would be a small price to pay."
"It is one you must, if you would prosper here. It is drunk of all, high and low. If you refuse it you cannot visit friends or receive. You will make no social progress at all. Beside that, it is better than tea. It will do you good."
Señor Amerigo left an assistant in charge of the library, to which, in fact, no one had entered while this conversation had been carried on, and led the way to his private apartment. Devereux was soon reclining in a siesta chair on a palm-shaded patio gay with a scarlet riot of tropic flowers, while a bare-legged, brown-skinned girl, deft and demure, handed him a carved silver-mounted cup in which there had been put a spoonful of the coarsely-powdered leaves of the maté bush, on to which, after a sprinkle of sugar, scalding water was poured. Señor Amerigo dropped a lighted cinder into his cup, which scorched the sugar and mate powder before the water was poured.
"I do not offer you this," he said," because it strengthens the flavour, which, being the first time that you taste, you will not prefer; but there will come a time (if you will make Manaos your home, and reflect that those who seek treasure will seldom find more than a quick death and a quiet grave) when you will take it as I do now. . . . You should drink it at the most heat that your tongue endures."
While he spoke, the girl had handed bombillas - silver tubes with tiny perforated bulbs at their lower ends - through which the maté tea is sucked, as English drinks are drawn through a straw. Devereux tasted that which he did not like, but resolved to swallow without sign of distaste. It was the first tribute he paid to the tale of the treasure Peixoto saw, and if it were more than a small instalment toward the whole he would be a fortunate man.
Stretched in comfort under the palms, Señor Amerigo began his tale.
"Hermes Peixoto," he said, "was a half-breed, the son of a Portuguese sea-captain, a man of noble descent who forsook the sea for the lure of gold in the new-found lands, and of an Indian woman of the Guarani race, whom it is said that he took to wife in a better way than was often done at that time. Hermes was of his father's kind, loving adventure, and restless for changing days and a new sky. He had some education also, for which his father paid, and the Jesuits gave. But he was Indian too, and could go where he would in the lands where the Guarani dwelt, or any tribes that were friendly to them; and as the years passed, and his father died, he would be absent more and more in the savage lands, coming to the settlements only when he would buy powder or salt or what else he might need for his own use, or to barter with the wild Indians of the woods.
"He came back at last with a handful of shining gems which were real enough to bring riches to a cousin who claimed them when he was dead, which was no more than a matter of weeks, for he had been poisoned in a way that no leech of that time could understand, as, indeed, they might be no better now, for there are drugs that the Indians know that are strange to us after four hundred years, and they have secrets they do not sell.
"But the stones were real, and so was the map he made, which is here still.
"And besides that there are many marvellous things which he is said to have told, but he wrote nothing down, only the map. And these tales may have been delusions that poison bred, or they may have been altered by other mouths, so that they may include things which he did not say.
"But some warnings he gave concerning the Indians of the great forests and swamps, which must first be traversed, have since been proved true, such as that of the cannibals who can treat their enemies' heads so that they shrink to five inches or four, while all the features remain; and of the Indians who cover themselves with luminous paint, so that they shine in the dark like monstrous glow-worms among the trees.
"But beyond that, only this is soberly sure, that he had the fierce anger of a man who had been brought to death in a treacherous way, so that he strove to incite others to destroy those who had done him so great a wrong.
"He did not wish to conceal the road to the riches he claimed to have found, nor to make profit therefrom. It was revenge he sought, and to start the most men he could on the same track.
"You may suppose that he found those who were glad to hear. Expeditions started almost at once, to be followed by others, some large, some small, each sanguine of success, whatever evil might have befallen the ones before."
"You mean that they have all failed to locate the treasure?" Devereux asked. Remembering that it was said to lie in some remote part of a savage and unknown land which more than equalled Europe in size, that did not sound an improbable result, even though it might be more genuine than the subjects of such traditions most often are.
"No. I cannot say that. It is not certain that they do not arrive. No one knows. The sure fact is that you do not return."
"May they not regain civilisation another way?"
"Which would you suggest? But if they should, would they not be heard of again? And would it happen so every time?"
"No. It doesn't sound likely. Though I suppose those who find great wealth may not be anxious to advertise it. They might be glad to slip quietly away, to avoid taxation and other claims."
"So they might - if they could. But I ask again which way could they go that would not be longer and worse than to return by the way they went.
"Besides, if they could find the treasure and bear it away, why should not others have reached the same spot and come back with the tale of a sucked egg? But that is guessing, which all may do as they please; the only fact which is known is that they do not return."
"Have they all started from here?"
"Not at all, the map is in the library here, for it was in the settlement here (which was then the highest upon the river) that Peixoto died. But the best way is from Essabo, which can be reached in two weeks' journey, first up the flood, and then by a smaller river."
"You said you went with one of these expeditions yourself?"
"I started out with one which was well equipped, and very confident that it would not be turned back without finding the place, and whatever treasure there might be, either much or none.
"This was more than twenty years ago, when I was younger, and willing for any chance that would bring experience of strange scenes or events, without greatly caring whether there was any treasure or not.
"It was then about fifteen years since any men had been known to make the attempt, for you will understand that, as the years had passed, and so many had not returned, the adventure had taken a very sinister tone, and, besides that, with the change of time, its legend becomes dimmer and less believed.
"But we said that, treasure or none, we would explore a country that had been hidden too long behind its barriers of forest and swamp. We started well equipped, as I have said, and all went well for the first week, during which we made good progress in our canoes, for so far (and, indeed, for a much longer time) the way is by water rather than land.
"But one night we landed, as the custom was, and slung our hammocks among the trees (for there was no dry ground at that place, and that time of year, and if there had been, no man would choose it for a couch, unless he would be eaten alive by ants, and other insects he could not name), and, in the morning we found that one of the canoes had broken loose during the night, and floated away.
"It held stores that we were not willing to lose, so some of us - four in all - took a light canoe, and paddled down stream at a good pace to find it, and bring it back.
"We could not tell how long we should be likely to be, as we did not know at what hour it had broken loose, nor if it might blunder among the trunks of the flooded trees or be swept to the middle stream, so we had paddled hard, keeping a good look-out, and after about an hour we saw it grounded on a muddy shallow, with dryer ground at one side, as it seemed, but that was no more than a likely guess, the forest growing so dense to the water's edge.
Well, we found that it had settled in the mud, so that it was not easy to move. We fastened it by a rope to our canoe, and two of us paddled to pull it off, and two others, of whom I was one, got out to push it along.
"Up to then we had not set eyes on an Indian, nor any sign of human life since we had left the settlements of civilisation behind. We seemed to have come to a vacant land. But suddenly we were surrounded by savages who rushed out from the trees.
"They had redwood swords, and had they sought our deaths we should have had a poor chance of escape - we two that were wading at least - but they had a different purpose in what they did.
"They were of a tribe that hunts men that they may be sacrificed in ceremonial ways, for which purpose they must be captured alive. Their method is to thrust at the thighs, so that they may secure their victims without inflicting a mortal wound, and as we knew what they would attempt when we saw the swords, we were able to hold them off for a time, defending ourselves with paddles which we snatched out of the canoe, and in the next minute our comrades opened fire, for there were two loaded rifles with them. . . . They shot straight, and one of the Indians fell, on which the others ran back into the trees, and the fight was done.
"But by that time I had taken a wound that had brought me down. It was the best I could do to fall into the boat, and when my companions, who stood by me stoutly enough, had got it afloat, and paddled back to where the others were waiting for our return, it was plain that I should be of no more use for that expedition.
"Well, I am making too long a tale of that which can be little to you, but was much to me at the time. What was to be done? If they took me on, it could only be to leave me when, at a later stage, they would have to abandon the boats, by which time it was certain that I should be unable to walk. If they left me there, it would be certain that I should be the Indians' meat, after being put to death with ceremonies I should be sure to dislike.
"I saw my companions look at each other and look at me, and I read that in their eyes which they would not say. I thought: 'If I go to sleep, or even if I am careless to turn my head, they will kill me, saying to themselves that it is the most merciful way, lest fall into the Indians' hands.'
"It was a thought which made my brain stir, though I was weak from the blood I lost, and I can remember now how the wound had commenced to burn and throb in a way that made thinking hard.
"I said: 'Give me the smallest canoe, which you can best spare, and food enough for a few days, and push me off to the middle stream, and I may come to Essabo alive. I shall go down in less time than we have taken against the strength of the stream. And I can paddle: my arms are sound.'
"Well, they were quick to agree. I knew they thought I had little chance, or I might say none, and few would few would say they were wrong; but it was a way out they were glad to take. I need not tell you I lived. . . . I suppose they were sorry for me, feeling whole themselves, and confident in the strength that their numbers gave, but they were never heard of again. They must have gone to their deaths, as eight hundred, first and last, at the best count I can make, had gone the same way before."
"It certainly," Devereux replied, "isn't a very promising enterprise for a stranger to undertake, even though the map may be good, for which there seems to be little proof. Fonseca must have judged me a fool if he thought that I would attempt it alone."
"Perhaps so. But you English have a reputation for such follies, so that it becomes an imputation you cannot avoid, especially when you are young and wander alone, and if you are staying in Manaos more than a day, I should advise you to let it be known that you are interested in Peixoto's map, for you will be safer if it is supposed that you have swallowed the bait."
"In that case, it will be well for you to tell me all that is known or which has grown with the years from the tale that Peixoto told, so that I may talk of it in a sensible way."
"So I will; though I have warned you to doubt how much may be true, or how much of it he ever said, for it is a most wonderful tale. And you will observe that, whether true or false, it has not proved of any use for the protection of those it should guide or warn. So, if I tell it, I must rely on you to take it for no more than it is. And, indeed, if I thought there were any fear that you might start on so vain a chase, I should give you an opposite warning from what I do. For it would be safer to let Fonseca have no knowledge of what you planned.
"You should know that he is said to traffic in secret drugs for which high prices are paid in London and the great cities of other lands. Cocaine is not the only strange drug that the Indians know. Fonseca traffics with them both up the river and here, and if he should pass the word to them that you are a spy upon what they sell, I do not suppose you would go even so far as a white man new to the land might be expected to do."
Señor Amerigo went on to tell a wild tale till the night was late, which it would be foolish to set down here, for so far as it was false (which it largely was, being verbal tradition which alters form as it passes from lip to lip) it would mislead, and so far as it was true, it would only be telling a tale which must be told for a second time, which it is well to avoid.
Also, there were matters in it to which Señor Amerigo himself could give no meaning, such as the warning which Hermes Peixoto was said to have been earnest to urge. "Do not drink it," he had declared, "do not drink the water, even though you see others do. For if you give way you will die."
"The difficulty in that," Amerigo said, "is that the water everywhere in the Amazon basin is wholesome to drink, and its quantity never fails. You could fill your own cup from the floods, so that you would have no fear of poison at all. And if you should see others drink, how could it be unwholesome to you?"
CHAPTER III
INTO THE UNKNOWN LAND
DEVEREUX waked next morning with a revulsion of mood from that of the night before. He remembered that he had returned late, with confused, excited thoughts of an adventure to undertake, such as he had not supposed that the earth could give now that it was all measured and mapped, as he had thought it to be. His mind had fastened upon the fact that Peixoto had come back alive, even though he had come back to die. Might not another come back in a better way?
His experience must, at least, have been different from that of those who had not returned. Might not that difference have its root in the fact that he had gone alone? That there might be a better hope for a single man?
And Peixoto had not come with empty hands, and no more than a proofless tale. He had brought rich jewels, and they had not been in the rough. They had been cut and polished (he had asked Señor Amerigo that, and he had been explicit in his reply). That proved some part of the tale, though much less than all. Thinking thus, he had resolved that he would slip quietly away. Surely a single man could traverse the river courses, silently, unobserved, perhaps moving only during the night, with a better chance of passing peaceably through than if men should go in a company with a noise of guns to alarm the savages, to whom the great woods were a threatened home, and whose poisoned arrows would be deadly from the dense ambush from which they would be likely to come?
So he had dreamed, as he had walked back to the hotel through the moonlit streets, but the morning brought saner thoughts. Was it likely that he, a stranger, ignorant not merely of the impenetrable forest of which Señor Amerigo had told, but of a hundred other things of which it would be needful to know, and which would be familiar to those who were native here - that he should succeed where all had failed for three hundred years? He put the thought from his mind. If he were to recover a shaken honour, and the fortune he once had had, he must use wits and money in more sensible ways.
Yet, having so resolved, his mind dwelt upon the idea with greater ease than before. Men may find it pleasure to dream of that which would be folly to plan. And while he dreamed he was impelled toward the attempt by a fact which he did not consciously weigh. He was like a man who cannot remain where he is, and who is made aware of an open gate where all others are shut to him. He may like or fear the road that it shows, but in the end he will go through.
The fact was that his partner's defalcations and flight, the news of which had reached him almost as he had landed at Rio, had not only swept away the bulk of the small fortune his father left: they had cast a shadow upon himself from under which it was not easy to move.
He knew that his visit to Rio - on business which his partner had proposed, and which had proved on arrival to be of a very visionary kind - gave him the appearance of having absconded from trouble about to come. To return to England would be to face the certain indignity of arrest, and a possible conviction for frauds which were not his. Even here, he did not know but that he might be reached by the patient implacable obstinacy of English law.
And it was for business in this country that he had been trained: it was its language that he had learned. If he would wander further away, where should he go except to the great wilderness which stretched around and ahead?
In the next weeks he found Señor Amerigo a friend with whom it had become pleasant to sit, and though he would dissuade him from serious thoughts of Peixoto's goal, and it was agreed that they talked in no more than an idle way, yet the idea was a subject of frequent debate, and he learnt much which, if he should venture so wild a quest, it would be needful to know.
There was a day when he sat under the vines of Señor Amerigo's patio, and said: "You will think me, mad, but I have decided to go. There is a cargo-boat in from Bristol on which I saw a light skiff, which, as I said to the captain, could not be very useful to him being unfit for the sea.
"Well, in a word, he agreed the price, and the boat is mine."
"On our rivers," Señor Amerigo replied doubtfully,"men prefer the paddle and the canoe."
"So they may, but I am more used to a boat. As a fact I can row better than most. I was stroke of a college crew."
Señor Amerigo looked at him in a moment's silence. He was aware of a purpose he could not change. He said no more than: "If you are resolved, I will wish you well."
Four days later, a river steamer, plying up to Essabo with many calls at the settlements which are to be found on the river banks, took the skiff on board, with the stores that Devereux had been counselled to buy, and the first stage of one of the wildest adventures on which even a wandering Briton ever staked his life had begun.
The little steamer, taking in wood for fuel from time to time at the quays where it tied up, went on day by day up a river that gradually narrowed till both banks could be clearly seen, and after that along a branch stream to the south, where there were still occasional clearings and human life on its wooded banks.
But these clearings, even from when Manaos had been left behind, had been no more than narrow, precarious footholds between the flood before and the crowding forest behind. For from the dense forest there came a pressure hat never ceased, either night or day, to snatch back the little patches of tillage that had been cleared by the petty efforts of human hands, and reassert its sovereignty of the land. It seemed to be ever pushing them back with contemptuous strength to the river from which they came.
And behind was the green, unchanging twilight of fronds that no winter found, of boughs that were never bare. A forest so dense of growth that to be five yards apart might be much the same as to be five miles away. A forest festooned and choked with lianas and clinging vines, so that, while it would be hard for any creature to move below, except where the waterways made clear shadowed aisles under closing boughs, life of jaguar and monkey, of snake and sloth, moved freely beneath the green roof of the twilight world, with no fear of falling to the far ground below, as in fact, it would not have been easy to do.
Devereux looked at this living wall from the steamer's deck as it went on for its endless leagues, and if his heart sank somewhat, it was a feeling he would not own. He looked at it, after that, from the lower view of a skiff's thwart, but it was then mostly by moonlight, or light of stars, for he rowed, as he had purposed, during the night, keeping the middle stream; and when daylight came he would draw in to the, bank, and tie up where he would be covered by friendly boughs, in which he would swing his hammock, and hope that he would not be drenched before night returned by a deluge of tropic rain.
He went on long in this way, forgetting the count of days, till the river narrowed, and became a network of channels of which the right one would not always be easy to choose, and now he found that he must make more use of the day, and even so there would be place where there would be little light, in passages narrow to thread.
It was after he had struck a blunt-nosed saurian with the boat's bow, startling both parties concerned, but with no more trouble than that, that he decided that he must abandon the sculls.
He had brought one of the round-bladed paddles that are preferred by the boatmen of the lower Amazon, and now he crouched in the bow, striking the water left and right, and seeing the way he went, which it was prudent to do where tree-roots would often spread out in the narrow stream.
Now the sunlight would only penetrate through the meeting boughs, if at all, at the height of noon. The forest bushes might be brilliant with flowers, the colours of a thousand various wings, from the humming-birds to the crowds of quarrelling parroquets and the bright macaws, might flash dazzlingly where the sunlight struck, but otherwise they would be tamed by the blue-green shadows that were their natural home. The raucous cries of the birds, fitted to penetrate through the heavy leaves and the steaming air, were a discord that seldom died, as was the noise of the screaming, chattering monkeys that made their homes in the boughs above. But the weeks went, with no sound of a human voice, no sight of a human form. . . .
Overhead, in the intervals of the rain, there must have been open blue, and there was doubtless power in the blaze of the midday sun, but that was far off, where the forest, reaching upward, fought for the light. Below, there was no excess of heat for a tropic land, but there was moisture everywhere from which there was no escape; and when the rain came, streaming down through whatever thickness of leafy boughs, and saturating the choked undergrowth, and the lianas that festooned the intervals of the crowding trees, it was impossible to do anything but find such shelter as the moment allowed, and crouch in the cover that oilskin gave.
For he found that he had come to an amphibious land. There was water - warm water not only beneath the boat and between the trees, but in the air, and soaking through from above, with a hot evaporation that never ceased. The dawn after the rain would be blind with mist. The evening would be mist-hidden again, after the deluge that fell in the afternoon. But the heat, enervating by moisture though it might be, was not overgreat under the green gloom of the trees. He could paddle hard enough while the rain held off, and he found channels which, though they twisted about, would still take him, more or less, in the direction he sought.
He had learned that the tropic night is alive, and the dawn is loud, but he had thought that the afternoon was still, until he became aware that he must have been partly wrong about that when an absolute silence came, such as he had not noticed before. It was as though the forest had ceased to breathe and crouched motionless in a waiting fear. And after the silence a darkness fell, so that he had a moment's wonder of whether he might not have mistaken the length of the monotonous day.
The air became hot and still, and the high dim isles of the water-courses mysterious, sinister, indistinct in the black gloom, which gave them a vague immensity beyond even that which they would show to the light of the tropic moon.
He knew that there must be something approaching now beyond the ordinary downpour of the afternoon, and became instinctively one with the fear that the forest felt. He drew the boat to the side of a rising bank, and moored it under the rankest growth that spread outward above the stream.
Far above, where there had been a sunlit surface a green that had been dried by the midday heat, the clouded heaven had come down like a brooding bird to the height that the forest rose.
It covered the trees with a soft grey breast that bore the rain which was ever craved by that sunburned surface of vivid green and brilliant exotic flowers, but it was a breast in which lightnings bred. The green ocean-surface, which had no part in the sombre darkness below, stirred with a fearful delight of the coming rain. Its upper boughs, from which the chattering monkeys had fled, murmured and moved. They lifted to feel the cool caress of the settling cloud, which burst at last in such a deluge of threshing rain as taught them how weak they were.
There was no wind, but the downpour flattened the boughs, so that the wide ocean of leaves was crushed like a trodden field. Its whole surface sank under the sudden weight of the rain. And with the rain there had come a thunder that did not cease, and a lightning that stabbed ever downward among the trees. It lit the dense gloom below with a ghostly, flickering, but continuous light, as it bored its black shafts of death, narrow and deep, that drove down to the distant ground.
Tomorrow, the forest would care little for that, having become active to heal its wounds. The surrounding life would crowd swiftly into those funnels of death, mounting on shrivelled vines, and eating into the dead tree-trunks that the rain would rot in the coming week. In a month there would not be so much as a hidden scar where there had come death to a forest lord, and to monkey and bird and a million insects that had sheltered throughout its depths.
CHAPTER IV
THE FIRST CHECK
THE rain penetrated the two hundred feet of tangle of vine and bough, not in drops, which it was too dense to permit, but in spouts of water that forced apertures through leaf and branch, and poured downward as though a million cisterns had leaked above. They struck on the surface of the stream, and on the broad leaves of the water-plants with a force that cast them upward again in cascades of spray. The atmosphere became water rather than air, and when a time came that the thunder died, and the lightning ceased, the gloom of the under-world was made worse than before by a mist that steamed upward from every leaf, until this was turned to a multicolour of light, as a ray of the sun that was now regnant again in the unseen blue struck down through the narrow aisle of the water-course, and made the mist a flashing dazzle of rainbow light, like a dewdrop of monstrous size.
Devereux watched, and was wet. He knew from what he had learned of lesser deluges in the last weeks, that the oilskin cover that he had stretched over the boat, stout though it was, would have been insufficient to protect its contents. It was, indeed, an atmosphere where nothing was ever dry, for the moisture was not merely upon the ground. It did not only fall from the sky. It was in the drenched air, which was wet to breathe. It penetrated everywhere but into the sealed cans, in which his food was stored, and whatever else must be kept dry for its use to last.
His clothing had become less and less in these days, until now it was next to none. He had found the truth of a warning that Señor Amerigo had given when he had seen that he was determined to come: "You may wear clothes if you choose when you are in the land of the forest rains, but they will always be wet, and the more you wear, the more you will be likely to die."
Now he looked out on a jewelled gloom in which life resumed, brilliant in colour, and discordant in raucous cries. High overhead, the long-tailed monkeys whistled and screamed, and the parrots called, discussing, and doubtless cursing the storm. Butterflies, topaz and green, sulphur and flaming scarlet, fluttered out from the under sides of the dripping leaves. Even a jaguar's cry in the distant trees had a joyous sound, and did nothing to still the impatient life that the lightnings had not consumed. Red dragonflies flashed through the gleaming mist that was no brighter than they. At three yards' distance, a half-grown boa glided into the water in a straight, purposeful way, and swam out with easy sinuous movements, its head showing for a moment, and then being hidden by the pervading mist. It took no notice of Devereux, at which he was unsurprised, having learnt already that if he avoided sudden movements or sounds, and went quietly his separate way, the teeming forest life would take as little notice of him, either to advance in anger or shrink in fear, or even to pause from pursuit of its own affairs.
And through the steam of the rain-drenched air, the scent of decay that rose ever from the rot of the fecund ground had become so constant that he had ceased to notice its pervading presence, now called with recruited strength, compelling consciousness of its message of the death that all life requires.
There would still be some hours of day before the quick twilight fell, and he hesitated as to whether he should attempt a further advance, or be content with the progress already made. Indecision ceased when he observed a convenient branch where he could swing his hammock clear of surrounding leaves, which had not always been easy to find. So he had a meal in the best comfort he could contrive, eating without stint, as he might do while he could stay with the boat, which still held far more than he would try to load on his own back, slung the hammock, and was quickly asleep in a world which he had found (except some insects) willing to leave him alone while he would treat it in the same way, and which he believed to be empty of men.
He waked to the coming dawn, which was proclaimed by a thousand voices before the dim light had pierced downward to where he lay. He rose quickly, having formed a habit of using the whole of the morning hours while the heat was least, and looked down on steaming mud, where there had been water the night before.
At a short distance away, the moored boat lay half in water and half aground, and it was clear that, if the water were still receding, he had no moment to lose if he were to get it afloat, and clear of the shallow in which it lay.
It was a danger on which Señor Amerigo had not been silent, but it was not one which he had been able to tell him how to avoid. As the great branches of the water system of the Amazon valley are left behind, and the traveller penetrates deeper inland among the streams and swamps from which they are fed, or which their surplus waters provide, there is a constant, ever-increasing danger that a recession of water will leave him aground in a position from which his craft may be floated again in a few hours, or may remain, in the absence of portage (which may be for ten yards or as many miles), for a whole season before the steaming, pool-broken mud becomes a course of running water again.
Devereux knew that, soon or late, he must abandon the boat, and depend for safety and sustenance on no more than he could bear on his own back through the steaming heat, as he must struggle on through the choked growth of the pathless way; and he was too vague as to the distance to be traversed, or that which he had already come, to guess how soon this would be. But he had not expected it to be yet. Not for weeks to come.
He knew, if Peixoto's tale or his map were true, that he would come clear at last from the forest plain to a sight of hills in a region of open land. Till that time, he had only to keep as straight a course as natural obstacles would permit, with his compass for guide. But how much of the forest would still remain to be crossed when he would abandon the boat was an unguessable chance, on which success or failure might largely hang. But he was sure that this was soon - a month too soon, if not more.
Sinking almost knee-deep in the soft, warm, treacherous mud, and indifferent in this instant peril to the living dangers about his feet, he heaved at the boat's stern until he had the satisfaction of feeling that it slid forward on to a floating keel. But the moment was short. He was scarcely aboard before it grounded again.
Releasing it once more, and in shorter time, he paddled for some minutes along an alley of water that was shallow, but did not fail. Then he came to a deeper channel, but one that too him almost directly backward from the direction he wished to take.
The morning hours were spent in a baffled effort to find some passage deep enough for the boat, and which did not lead away from the course he sought. At the end of that time, he reckoned that he must have lost several miles, and was no nearer to finding a forward channel.
He was exasperated at this time to see deep water on his left hand, almost within reach, but separated by a muddy, tree-cumbered shallow, which broadened and rose until the further water was hidden from view. When he caught it again, it gleamed through an aisle of shade, showing by that that it was broad enough for the sun to reach downward between branches that did not meet. As he went on paddling in the opposite direction from that which he wished to take, he began to debate in his mind whether it would not have been better to attempt to get the boat across to that deeper water, even though it should have meant unloading all its contents. He thought that he had seen no obstacle over which he might not have dragged the empty boat.
But it was not a thing to turn back to attempt, unless the advantage were sure. What was the extent and direction of that water which had been near and had looked wide? He determined to tie up the boat and make a short exploration under the trees, which did not appear at this point to be set very closely together, nor was the sodden ground at their roots cumbered with undergrowth too dense to be broken through.
He had largely lost his fear of the forest at this time. He had grown familiar with it from the comparative security of the boat. Even the dreaded mosquitoes had not troubled him after the first few. days, for they are a plague from which the Amazon basin is, in some places, capriciously free. And as to men, there had been no sign in all these weeks that there had been any there from the dawn of time.
But he drew on wading-boots that were strong and high, and put on a coat, less as a protection from the pricks he was sure to meet than for the convenience its pockets gave. He did not think it necessary to cumber himself with the rifle, which he had ceased to draw from its waterproof case, but he put a revolver in his pocket, less from any expectation that it would be of use than from recognition of the etiquette the occasion required. He took a machete in a more practical mood, and set out on what he did not intend to be more than a short survey.
So it was. Probably shorter than he had meant, if maximum distance from the boat be the standard by which to judge. When he got safely back, two or three hours later, under a deluge of rain, he may not have been more than three hundred yards distant at any time. He had done little, and seen less, but he had learnt more.
For one thing, he had experienced the terror that comes to those who are lost in that illimitable wilderness without hope of escape. He had experienced solitude he had not known it before.
It had happened, as it seemed, at a step. He had been making what he thought to be a straight confident way, slowly indeed, but surely enough, when he had stumbled in a ground-vine tangle, and broken free to become aware that the forest growth was a wall around him on every side, and that direction was lost.
He thought at first that it was a matter of a step or two, with a few good machete blows that would bring him clear, but he found he was wrong in that. He hacked and struggled on for the next hour in a growing fear. He could not tell in the least whether he were getting nearer to the boat or further away. He might observe that he was on a higher level than that to which the water had risen in recent weeks, by the growth that the ground had borne, but how much meaning was there in that? He could wish that he had brought a compass for guide, as he surely ought to have done, but there was no avail in regret.
He knew that, if he were lost, his position would be worse - far worse - than if he had been obliged to abandon the boat in a deliberate way, for now he was without a score of essential things on which life must rely. He was without the rifle on which food and defence might entirely depend. He had not the hammock, light to carry, but able to give him sleep clear of the night-damp, insect-infested ground. He had not - but what use was there in thinking thus? He must get back to the boat, or he. would be no better than dead. . . . Overhead, a jaguar barked in the trees.
He looked up at the sound, and his movement drew the eyes of the beast, which had not observed him before. Its teeth showed in a snarl blended of ferocity and surprise, and perhaps fear. He had the sense and nerve to remain silent and still, and after a moment of hesitation it gave a lithe swift spring, which hid it among the leaves.
He had a new fear after that, lest at any moment he might feel its paws on his back, and its hot fanged mouth reaching round for his throat, that would be so easy to tear, but even for that he could not lose the more urgent imminent dread that he would not get back to the boat.
Desperation improved his wit. It was plainly dangerous to continue in a direction that might be taking him further away. But if he should retreat his course, which should be simple to do through the hacked and trampled vines, he could start in another direction from the spot where he had first been conscious that he was lost. If he should continue to make short excursions from there until he should find the path which he had cut, no forest could be so dense that it would not yield its secret at last, where the area of necessary exploration must be so small.
This he did, having shock enough when he found how far from straight, and how few yards was the way he had come, but by persistence in the plan he had formed, he came free at last, and back to the boat, which had the look of a lost home, just as the afternoon rain became heavy among the trees.
CHAPTER V
ON THE ROOF OF THE FOREST WORLD
THE experience through which he had passed, short though it was, had been sufficient to strengthen his resolution not to abandon the boat, while it also disinclined him from further risks of the same kind. He was tired by the exertions that he had made, and as the night was not far off he resolved to remain where he was till the next day, but he first took the precaution of marking the water-level, and looking at it again in an hour's time, when it appeared that it was unchanged, so that he should not fear to wake again to the sight of a stranded boat.
As he lay awake in his hammock that night, he looked up at the dense concourse of trees, standing blackly in the clear uncoloured light of the tropic moon, and an idea came. Why should he not climb to the roof of that forest world, and see whether there were any sign of water around, or perhaps that he were nearer its limit than he had guessed? It would be no harm at the worst, and it should be quite easy to do.
So when morning came he looked for a tree that was straight and high, but not bare of lateral boughs, as those of the palm varieties were, and he climbed with ease. Indeed, as he moved upward through the dim green world that was as remote from the sun above us as from the fecund rot of the swamp below, he saw that it would be hard to find a place for unhindered fall.
But he found that he was no longer unconsidered or unobserved. The tree-dwellers were alert to the danger of large creatures that came up from the ground. The parrots fled with a squawking of many throats that alarmed a hundred birds of as brilliant hues though less voluble tongues. The spider-monkeys dodged around, curious but wary, with warning whistles to their companions of where he came. They were not far away, but in constant movement among the trees, and he saw that it would have required a good aim, at an instant's uncertain sight, to bring them down, either with a bullet, or the short straight flight of a blowpipe's dart.
He climbed on in a growing light, which he did not like. He blinked blindly against the sun. He had become used, for so many weeks, to the half-light of the shaded streams, and to look right and left into the deeper gloom of the forest depths, that his eyes had become unequal to face the glare of the tropic sun. Turning his back to the east, where it was still low, he waited awhile, looking down, and then shading his eyes, as they became more equal to face the light. He was able to look round after a time, but what was there to see?
Beauty enough, for one of a leisured mood. A dark-green ocean of varnished leaves that swayed in the morning wind, and here and there an eruption of splendid flower. His trouble was that he could see but a short way. He was like a fish that comes up from the ocean depths. It may see the sky and the nearer waves, but how far can it look round, beyond them? Not at all.
The tree he had climbed did not rise above its fellows, which it would not have been easy for it to do. The forest surface was flatter than the waves of a windy sea. Standing on the topmost bough that would bear his weight, he could see for twenty yards, here and there, with further glimpses as the giant palm-fronds around him swayed in the wind. He saw that he had made a wise choice in the tree he climbed, for the most of the trees were tufted high above the trunk, where a climb must end. The trouble was that the whole forest had the same will for the sun. The trees must reach up to an equal height, unless they had been thwarted and choked in the damp heat of the fierce conflict below.
Here it was not damp. It was dry and hot. The great trees drew one strength from the sun, and another from the dark swamps that were far below which the sun could not reach to dry. Those were the conditions of life, for which they fought with ruthless relentless wills, and for which the creeping vines clutched each other and them, and climbed up with a strangling hold.
It appeared to Devereux that when he thought he could see far by that climb he had made a bad guess. Yet he was not one to be easily foiled. Once, in the course of a swaying gust, he thought that he saw a place where the surface of the green ocean rose. He waited patiently till the wind came with the same caprice, and this time he was sure.
He decided to reach that spot, which should not be hard, and was then deterred by a memory of yesterday's fear. He would not risk being lost again for much more than he would be likely to see.
But he considered that there was no possible doubt of that, if he were cautious in what he did. Here he had the sun's help. He could observe that the loftier trees he sought were almost due south of his own position. If he were careful to make his return due north, he could not be far away from the tree by which he had climbed, and to find it could only be a matter of time. The clump of loftier trees would be a mark that he could not miss, and to which he could return, if need be, a dozen times. In such a case he could not become utterly lost. The chances were large that he would not be lost at all.
The tree by which he had climbed was not of a common kind. It had rather large elongated leaves, dark green, streaked with grey. It was a kind of leaf more common among the low growths of the swamps than the major trees. He broke its topmost branch, so that he could identify it beyond doubt, and began to make way through the trees, keeping sufficiently near the surface to watch the sun, so that he should not swerve from a straight course. So he came to the place he sought, where the forest roof was lifted by a rise of the ground below.
Here he got a further sight, being able to mount perhaps thirty feet above the level of the green ocean that stretched away westward, and seemed to have no limit at all. That was the limit of what he learned: that the forest had no limit that could be seen in the clear air, no break in the swaying dark-green carpet of frond and bough. It was not much to learn, for he knew he could not see very far at that height. He half-circled the group of the loftier trees, but got no more than the same vision of swaying green, over which a great hawk moved on slow broad wings, waiting to stoop, as fishing-eagles move over the sea.
So far, he had gained little to pay his pains. He knew only that there was no stretch of water within some miles that was broad enough to prevent the green ocean having an unbroken aspect from the little height he had gained, and he might have guessed that, and spared the loss of the finest part of the day. He became in haste to get back, and conscious of aching unaccustomed muscles, that would be glad to rest again on a boat's thwart.
He did not work round the circle of the higher trees on his return, having no more expectation of anything it would be advantage to see. He went straight ahead, through the midst of the boughs, and so came to something he had not sought, and would have chosen to miss.
CHAPTER VI
A BIRD'S-EYE VIEW
DEVEREUX came to a place where he could go straight forward no more, for the trees stopped. He looked down on a circular clearing, in the midst of which there was a single conical hut of a great size. It was steeply built, so that from above it looked to be narrower than it was. He saw small patches of tilled ground. He saw figures move. He knew he had come to one of the Indian dwellings of which he had been told, and he became as still as the branch he held.
It seemed to him a strange chance that he should thus have come upon one of their communal dwellings, such as he could not doubt it to be, and which are said to be so well hidden in woods so dense that even their nearest neighbours do not know where they are, after he had travelled so long without seeing a living man. But the explanation was simple enough. He had been drawn to that spot by the greater height of the trees, and the Indians had chosen the spot from the same cause - that it was a higher place, to which the floods would be unlikely to rise.
Here, on the forest roof, the difference in height made it a conspicuous place, but that would not be observable from below. In fact, the settlement had covered most of the rising ground, so that the higher trees, around which he had come at first, were a mere fringe for this open circular space, into which he looked down as one might view a bearpit of a great size.
He thought the shape of the narrow conical hut to be foolishly queer, but there was reason for that. It rose high to defeat the floods, which would rise at times to a level that made a wooded lake of the whole land: its sides were steep to present the least resistance to the frequent tempestuous rain that descended upon it.
The house was not built for warmth, for here there was no cold in the night, nor any winter season at all. It was built to defeat water alone, for which it could not have been better shaped.
Devereux watched those who had no suspicion of him. He saw men go into the forest, and others return. He saw women work on the crops. There were some young children that ran about. The men wore loin cloths, supported by belts in which hung weapons or tools. The women and children wore precisely nothing, unless it were a necklace of cayman's teeth, or a jaguar's claw.
To Devereux, looking down on their olive-brow bodies, they appeared to be vigorous, well-made healthy, more alert than he had observed the civilised men of this tropic land to be. So they were. They maintained a high standard of health, among other ways, by holding their new-born babies under water a sufficient time to make sure that the weaklings died.
If a baby were ill-formed, or unpleasing in any way, its mother could be relied upon to hold it under long enough to make doubly sure, so that she would not need to produce it for the derision of other eyes, for parturition was a lonely affair.
Devereux could see their forms, which he was bound to approve. He could not see their faces so well, which he might have liked less.
He saw that they all, children, women and men, lived nakedly in a single abode, and he thought by that that they must be savages of a low kind. So, in some ways, they were. But in this matter he was largely misled by analogies which did not apply. The dwellings sheltered them from the rain while they slept, and preserved their tools, which were the main uses it had. Within its bounds they were held by an etiquette which had the force of the strictest law. No man within that conical wall would so much as touch his own wife with a kindly hand. Their privacies were for the forest depths. It was the home that was public here.
There were good reasons for this, as for the fact that they went unclad, but because they might be condemned on a wrong count it did not follow that they were less than base. They were human, compounded of bad and good, and their eyes, which were cruel and small, held no mercy for any stranger about their gates.
Devereux watched them for a time going in and out, and about their daily affairs. He was sure that he would not be observed while he remained still. He was less sure how it would be when he should move, as at last he must.
But he had no mind to remain till dark, and attempt return in the night. He was stiff and tired. Sooner or later, he must withdraw as quietly as he could contrive.
He saw men go, mostly with hunting weapons, or come back with the spoils they won. He noticed that they took no regular paths, but pushed out through the undergrowth anywhere, which, being so treated, in that fecund wet heated soil, would doubtless heal any wounds of passage they made in a space of hours, so that it would soon become invisible to the keenest eyes.
But he noticed that there was one side upon which none went out or in, and he determined that that should be the one by which he would attempt to get back to the boat. He had been observant upon what was a deliberate fact, but the deduction he made was wrong. They avoided that side because it was there that their treasure lay, being the unmarried girls of the tribe. So it came that it was not long before he was looking down on a smaller hut, though of the same shape. The cleared space was smaller also, but it was enough for the seven girls he saw, who were learning a dance that a woman taught.
CHAPTER VII
DUEL AMONG THE TREES
THE practice of segregating unmarried girls, which has become general among the Amazonian Indians over enormous territories into which civilised men rarely or never penetrate, is of comparatively recent origin, appears to have no relation to their own sexual customs, and may be the sole instance in which the impact of European civilisation has disturbed the established traditions by which they live.
By ancient, reasonable custom, a captured enemy should be killed, as prudence dictates (should we let him loose to use his blowpipe on our own backs, or to steal the turtles' eggs from our own stream?); and he may also be eaten, or at least his best joints, for it will be a particular insult to him, and what merit can there be in the waste of excellent food? (But we do not eat the kidneys nor other offensive internal organs either of men or any other creatures, as the white savages are said to do. we are cleanly men!) Pitiless strife there had always been under pressure of economic laws which made human existence hard; but the taking of slaves with the possible exception of very young children, was unknown till the white men came.
Even the capture of wives, though it might be simulated in bridal ceremonies, had become extinct, if it had ever prevailed; for what use would there be in capturing a woman whom there would be no means to detain? And one who (which would be much worse than her loss) might betray the position of the lodge to which she had been brought.
But in the last centuries there had come change. There had risen a market for slaves in the white settlements along the river banks and the distant coast. It was for slaves of various kinds, often masquerading in other names, as religion or law required, but constant in its demand for young unmarried Indian girls.
The far depths of the forest might be secure from the white men's raids, but not from that of the next Indian tribe, and girls once caught could be bartered from lodge to lodge, till they would come at the far last to the estate of some wealthy estanciero, who would purchase them for his own use, or a river-captain who would take them down to the great city beside the sea.
In either case, a girl so bartered would have no hope of escape. It would be impossible, almost from the day when she was seized, for her to find her way back to the remote and nameless spot in the million miles of the forest from which she had been hurried away, and which, till then, she may never have left for as much as five hundred yards of its changeless gloom. They would accept fate, perhaps not always with hardship or much regret, and became the mothers of the half-breed mestizos who are now so large a proportion of the inhabitants of the civilised provinces of Brazil.
The Indian tribes, finding existence threatened by pillage of those from whom the next generation should come, had replied with this protective device. Their communal lodges, hidden in the deepest glooms of the pathless forest, might not be easy to find. But they must be daily going out and in, and might be tracked or watched in spite of all their precautions, and the remorseless slaughter of alien spies. So they would make a separate and yet deeper seclusion only and very circumspectly to be approached by those who took it the food required, apart from which none went out or in, and here, from an early age, they shut the unmarried girls until puberty (which would come late in that sunless gloom) should fit them for marriage and the motherhood that the tribe required. . . .
Devereux looked down on six bodies of olive-brown and one that was of a lighter hue. He saw six that were comely enough, though with a tendency to be thick and short. He saw one that was taller and more slender, so that the difference of height appeared to more than it was. He was not unwilling to look, but he was most unwilling to be looked at. For the moment, he remained absolutely still. While he remained so, he looked down, which was a sufficient reason that he did not see a man who was in the tree-tops on the opposite side, and who was even stiller than he.
The man, who was stationed there to see that no harm approached to the virgins' lodge without alarm, which it would be his duty to raise, looked at Devereux in a natural wonder of what he was. He knew the appearance of the Indians of his own, and of all the neighbouring tribes, but this was something he had not met. He knew only that it was a stranger he saw and he had been born to the knowledge that a stranger is not a friend.
His glance searched the trees, but could observe no evidence that Devereux was not alone. If he had no support, it appeared to show that he had come not to attack but to spy. The first necessity, in that case, was not to raise alarm, but to make sure that the spy did not escape. Very cautiously, he shifted his position somewhat among the leaves, to give him a clearer sight, and put a well-poisoned arrow to the string of his bow.
Devereux had his feet on one branch, and his hand on another that crossed before him, over which he leaned to look down. He was aware that this branch quivered, as though it had been struck a sharp blow. He looked at an arrow-shaft that had not been there a moment before. He touched it with a startled hand, and it broke off at the point to which it had entered the tree. He saw with a half conscious surprise that it had been cut almost completely through at the point at which it had broken off. He remembered, in the back of his mind, that he had been told of this Indian custom the purpose of which was that it should be more difficult to draw the poisoned point from the wound.
The thought did not delay his eyes, which were instant to look in the direction from which the arrow had come. He saw the Indian, who thought, with some excuse that the first arrow had found its mark, in the act of setting another to the cord, to make probability sure.
Devereux might have had time to withdraw from sight before the shaft flew, though it would have been a close doubt, but he tried a quicker and bolder course. He pulled out his revolver and fired. The shot missed, but may have disconcerted the Indian's aim, for the second shaft was less accurate than the first.
There followed a duel of shaft and shot, the issue of which might be hard to guess. The range was extreme for accuracy, either with revolver or bow. The Indian had the advantage of greater practice and skill, but he had the slower weapon, and a disadvantage of light, for while the forest-dwellers can see much better in the gloom to which they are born than any white men are likely to do, the sight of their small, deep-set eyes is worse in the full light of the sun, and the situation of the combatants was such that it was high overhead, but rather behind Devereux's back.
The revolver was emptied before the Indian had equalled the accuracy of his first attempt. Devereux, whose last two shots had been more deliberate than the earlier ones he had realised that haste and waste are as much alike as the words sound, was in the act of retreat, having no mind to remain a mark now that his weapon was empty, when he saw that his enemy was pitching forward, as one whose balance hard to keep. He saw him slip through a cracking of boughs for some thirty feet, fall outward, bounce on an out-jutting branch, and somersault to the distant ground.
Devereux's eyes followed his fall, and looked down on girls who no longer danced, and whose upturned faces had become easy to see. He saw seven (including that of the instructress) which were flat-featured, with high cheek-bones, and small recessed eyes, though these general characteristics were subject to much individual variation, and were even allied to some pulchritudes of youth and sex. He saw another face of a different kind.
But he had no leisure to look at bare bodies, nor faces evil or good, nor was he in any mood to admire, had they possessed the beauties of Grecian art. As a fact, he might have seen more had he not been two hundred feet overhead, where the light was more strong than below. But he had no trouble for that, having more urgent affairs.
He considered quickly that, if his assailant had been alone, he might be in no present peril, but that there would now be alarm was sure, and pursuit seemed an almost equal certainty. How quickly he could get back to the boat had become a question of life and death, and he began to push through the boughs, making the half-circuit of this open space which delayed his direct advance, and careless now of whether or not he might be visible to the women below.
CHAPTER VIII
DUEL PRELUDES DUET
HE who seeks to make speed through the forest roof must have eyes only for where he goes, however thick may be the eager branches that struggle upward to reach the light. Devereux saw no more of a sharp scuffle below, or of a hardwood dagger thrust through a woman's side by a strong young hand, than of the spider-monkeys that whistled mockery of his clumsy progress among the trees.
He had worked round the open space, and was, (he hoped) making a straight way to the tree by which he had climbed when he was aware of pursuit that came from below, following him faster than he could flee, while it was also gaining his height. It could not be far, in that thickness of leaves, or he would not have been aware of it at all. It must be coming straight on his track, guided, he supposed, by the noise he made, and making better progress than his, or the sounds would not be louder, nearer, than a moment before. Well, if he could not fly, he must try the only remedy that remained.
He paused in a tree's fork, breaking his revolver and reloading it with hasty fingers, and as he closed it again, with no second to lose, his pursuer appeared through the leaves.
"Why have you stopped?" a girl's voice asked sharply in Portuguese. "Don't you know which way to go?"
"I beg your pardon," he replied to the half-seen nudity that seemed so unconscious of itself, "you shouldn't have followed me like that. You very nearly got shot."
"What did you expect me to do when you didn't wait?"
"I didn't expect anything. How was I to know you were there?"
"How were you to know? Well, when you had got that far, and shot Teripa, you might have waited to see. After I'd had to knife the old witch, I could still see the way you were going off. . . . I suppose you'll say next you didn't see me do that?"
"I'm afraid not. I was too anxious to get away myself; and, besides, how could I have guessed that anyone would be there?"
As he spoke, he gave no attention to a bird's cry raucous, penetrating and shrill, which could be heard three times from the ground below, and was then thrice repeated from a distance away. But the girl knew it for the signal it was.
"Well," she said impatiently, "it's no use staying to talk. Don't wait for me. Get ahead. I can climb faster than you seem able to do." And then, with a sharper doubt, as the implications of his last words entered her mind: "I suppose you know where you're going? You're not lost, are you? You're not alone?"
"I'm alone, but I'm not lost. At least, I hope not. I've got a boat, if we can reach it before we're caught."
The girl stopped dead. She said no more to urge him to go on, nor gave any sign of following.
"Alone?" she repeated, in a voice in which terror and amazement strove. "You mean no one's with you at all? How do you hope we can get away?" And then, with intuitive realisation of what must have been incredibly unlikely to her: "You mean that we're both in the same mess? You didn't come to find me at all?"
"No," he said. "I've no idea who you are. But it's silly to lose time talking here. I've got a boat, and I've got to get to it, if it's not too late now. . . . You can go back, if you like. I should think it might be the best thing to do."
The girl appeared to hesitate, as though she were inclined to the same view. Then she said bitterly: "I can't do that now I've killed Chaota. What a mess you've got me into!"
"If we stay here, it'll be a bigger mess than it is now. . . . I hadn't asked you to come." He spoke with a bitterness equal to her own. He saw himself to be involved in a desperate position from which it seemed that, if he came clear, he was to have a young woman upon his hands who would almost certainly require him to turn back to the civilisation from which, by her speech, she had surely come. And a young woman of unpleasant temper, and many uncertainties of what she might prove to be. One who talked of him getting her into a mess! Her own unreason must be excuse for the rudeness of his reply.
"I don't want to stay here," she answered, in a milder voice, "and it's silly to quarrel. We haven't time. But we can't go back to the ground now, looking for boats. Not till after dark. If they haven't found it by then, we can get away. They're never out after dark. They're afraid. They think the devil would get his own. . . . I can show you where they won't find us till then, if it's still to let."
She turned, as she spoke, and began to climb in another direction, looking back for him to follow, which he did reluctantly, neither liking the turn of events, nor sure that there was wisdom in the course which she had chosen for both.
It still seemed to him that the best chance of escape would be to get quickly to the boat. Surely, every moment of delay would increase the probability that it would be discovered, and the position rendered desperate by its loss, even though they might hide successfully for a time, or get away through the trees. But it was a case of one being of doubtful mind, and one sure, and the latter won, as must always be.
They went on for about half an hour, the girl leading in an assured way, which must pause for him at times, even though, as she went on, she descended half down through the trees to where there was a maximum density in the tangled twilight through which they must force a way, and they were divided equally from the ground, that was a hundred feet below, and the light that was the same distance above. As she led, she was hidden from a clear view by the thickness of leaves and the dim light, but she must stop at last, which she did in the fork of a giant trunk, so that he came to her side.
She was either become in fact as unconscious by habit of her own nudity, as were the Indian girls among whom she had been confined, or so, with a woman's simulation, which is always more than a man has at command, she would make it appear; and, indeed, the occasion was not one to encourage wandering or self-conscious thoughts in one who had seen how the Soquito Indians dealt with their captured foes. Devereux, with less exactness of knowledge to sharpen fear, was as aware as herself of the extremity of the peril from which they fled; and, beyond that, he had a feeling of exasperation at this caprice of unlikely fate, that might place him in a dilemma of conflict between chivalry and the attempt for which he had risked so much. So that it was with little consciousness of themselves, or of the conventions in which they had been equally bred, that they bent together to look down a narrow space that divided the trunk upon which they clung from that of another tree of almost an equal girth.
She pointed down to what looked from above to be no more than a great wrinkle of bark. "Under there," she said, "is a hole large enough to conceal us till night, which they will be unlikely to find. We can get down well enough with a rope of vines."
"You are sure it is large enough?"
"I lived in it for months. The question is, is it occupied now? When I found it first, there was a jaguar who thought he had better right."
"And you stayed?"
"I had no choice. He came when I was in, though I do not say I was greatly surprised, for there had been signs and scent which I could not miss. I had a gun then, and I shot before he knew I was there. But it was a narrow place, which neither could leave, and he clawed me before he died."
She looked down on her left side, where there were three long scars, giving evidence of wounds that must have uncovered the ribs, and a single deeper fissure in the soft flesh of the hip. They showed livid in the green light, and were a poor encouragement to anyone to approach that cavity in a blind way. But there is no room in the human mind for two equal fears. Far below, there came the discordant cries they had heard before. They came three times, making it certain that they were born in a man's throat. Devereux said: "I don't suppose there'll be anything there."
"Well," she answered, "you go first, if you feel like that. But you'd better have your gun ready, in case you're wrong."
He neither liked the risk nor the levity with which she passed it to him, but he saw it had to be done, and he could not ask her to lead the way. He had the vines in his hands now, their luxuriant tendrils pulled down, and tested by a sharp wrench for their strength to endure his weight. She said: "I'll be with you as, quickly as I can get."
Without answering, he swung out, and slid down, and entered the cleft in the tree's side, which was larger than he had expected to find. The next moment she was at his side, having been as good as her word, which was more than he had expected to see. Indeed, she being weaponless, and nude as she was, it was an act of courage which he was obliged, though none too willing to admit to his own mind.
The cavity in which they stood may have been the result of some accidental injury to the tree in its sapling days. Trivial then, it had grown with the tree's growth, until now it was a gaping wound in the huge trunk, where three or four might have sat with ease, though they could not have stood upright, except at the very edge, if they had been much more than four feet high.
"You are sure," Devereux asked, "that they won't be able to track us here?"
"Not exactly that. In the end, I've no doubt they would. But we can't be seen; nor heard if we keep quiet. When they get on our track, they'll trace our way through the trees as easily as you read a book. But there are a great many trees, and they can't get everywhere in an afternoon. Besides, they will look most on the ground. They won't think we should travel far in the trees."
"If they do that, they'll be most likely to find the boat." The thought reminded him that it was long since he had eaten last, and that he had no food with him.
"I don't know," he said, "how long it is since your last meal, but I hope we haven't got to wait till night, and then till we can find the boat in the dark, before we can get the next."
"No, you needn't do that, if they're still here."
She looked in the back of the cavity, and found some pods of Brazil nuts, which were soon broken and shared.
"There are nuts enough now in the trees," she said, "and some other things. We shouldn't starve if we were here for a month. But it was different when I got caught. For one thing, it was the opposite time of the year. . . . The Indians say no one need ever starve, if he will go where the monkeys go. Before I heard it, I had found out the truth of that.
"I got food of kinds while they were all about, but there came a day when they had cleared every nut from the trees, and the next they were gone.
"I'd got some stored here, as you see, but I didn't want to eat nothing else, and I knew they'd be gone long before the next crop if I did. So I tried stealing from the Indians once or twice, and if you know how they live, you'll know that it wasn't easy to do. But I had patience, and I'm not afraid of the dark. So I succeeded once or twice. I tried mostly to steal weapons, so that I could get food for myself. Then I got too bold, and got caught."
"They didn't treat you badly?"
"They didn't treat me like those of us they caught before, nor like some prisoners they brought in about ten days ago, or I shouldn't be here. Beyond that, the less said the better. By the way, there's one of their javelins lying that side. I don't suppose either of us could throw it straight, but it might be good for a poke. . . . No! Take care! Stop! . . . Don't you know what they are? You'd have broken it, anyway and killed me, if not yourself, more likely than not."
The javelin had been prudently laid with its point inward to the shallow back of the little cave. It was nearly six feet long, made of hard-grained wood, but very slender and frail, so that it might have snapped in a child's hand. It was pointed with a palm-spike which looked frailer yet, but it was in its weakness that its venom lay, nor was it designed for a second use.
The brittle spike was smeared with the glutinous sap of the Mavacure creeper, the cataleptic curare, which would bring those it pricked by a short road to a rigid death. The shaft was almost cut through at the top, as Devereux had observed the arrow-head to have been, so that it should snap, if not before, at the first attempt to draw the point from a poisoned wound. Being so light, a man might carry a dozen or more of these throwing darts in a bamboo case, and know that each would be death to any creature to whom it should give a wound that might be no more than a punctured skin.
As he understood this, more from her words than anything he could see in that shadowed place, where the light that entered was next to none, and moved the javelin with a greater care until he had it pointing outward, to be a menace to any approaching foe, he said: "I might have guessed that, before you explained. It is all poisons and stealth in this hateful land."
She answered more reasonably, and with words that showed that she had assimilated something of the philosophy of Indian life: "What would you expect, in a land where you could find no metal, nor any stone for a thousand miles? And what but stealth can they use, where to see five yards ahead is a wide view?"
"Well, they may suit you. I call them no better than beasts, or perhaps worse. They are beasts with a man's wits."
"They are bad enough, but they are not that. It is never foolish to understand."
The talk died in mutual resentment, as they listened to the falling water-spouts that were now pouring along the boughs, and cascading from the broad leaves of the palms, as the heavy afternoon rain beat on the forest roof. She understood the implication that she had become degraded to toleration of savage ways, and he knew that he had been told that he was lacking in sympathetic imagination, if not in brains, as a sufficient reply.
He was the first to break a foolish silence to ask: "Will they keep up the search in this rain?"
It seemed a question both reasonable in itself, and one that would take their thoughts back from themselves to the peril in which they were, but she chose to read it another way.
"How should I know better than you? You should ask an Indian that." And then, as he took her petulance without retort: "I suppose it depends upon how much they are alarmed, or determined to get me back. They must be puzzled as to what happened, or how many friends I have, Teripa and the old woman both being killed."
"They will have been told what the girls saw."
"And how much was that? And what sense will they get from them?"
He avoided the obvious reply that she should judge such questions better than he, lest he be taken to repeat the offence of a few moments before, but he saw that she had, in fact, appreciated the situation better than he had done.
He had seen only their own position, as that of two fugitives fleeing overwhelming pursuit, as in fact they were, but he had failed to see how differently the event would appear to the Indians, who would know only that the secret lodge had been discovered, its guardians killed, and its captive rescued, all of which would reasonably appear as an enterprise deliberately and successfully planned. They might well be both alarmed and circumspect in their reactions, and seeing this, he saw more clearly than before that there might have been wisdom in seeking this hidden retreat at first, leaving them mystified as to the numbers of foes that they could not find.
He changed the subject, though with a natural sequence of thought, to ask: "Do you mind telling me how you got into the Indians' hands? There seems to be nothing better to do for the next hour."
"Yes, I'll do that, if you'll tell me about yourself, which seems queerer to me."
CHAPTER IX
JUANITA EXPLAINS
"I CAME from Manaos," she began, "about two years ago - perhaps less than that, but I can't tell to a few weeks, unless I know what date it is now."
"I don't know exactly myself. I should say it's about - - "
"It doesn't matter. My uncle came up from Rio - I'd been living with him - about some rare timber for a Paris firm, which he wished to inspect himself before they were loaded up. While he was there he met a man named Fonseca, whom he didn't like, and they quarrelled at first about some business matter I didn't follow - but after that they became friendly again, and Fonseca told him of a wonderful treasure beyond the forest, that's been known of for three hundred years, but no one's been able to find. He thought it was nonsense at first, but found it was something different from that, and decided to get up an expedition to discover it, though he was told that many people had come this way, but no one ever returned.
"He said that if the spirit of the first explorers hadn't died out, people wouldn't have lived here for hundreds of years leaving the most part of the country unknown, whether it had treasure or not, and it was quite time someone made another attempt.
"So he hired about forty men - the best he could get who had been in the Amazon forests before, though, of course, not as far in them as this, anything like - and he brought no end of provisions, and arms, and things for gifts to the Indians, if they would have sense enough to be friends - and there was a machine-gun, and altogether nine loaded canoes when they set out. He said he should be sorry for any bow-and-arrow Indian's who wouldn't let him alone - - "
"All the same, he shouldn't have let you come."
"You musn't blame him for that. He meant to leave me behind. In fact he'd booked my passage back to Rio on the next boat. . . . But I thought it would be more fun to come, and when he'd had enough start I followed, first on the next steamer that came up the river, and then in a light canoe that could move faster than his, and caught him up when it was too late to do anything worse than scold."
"It was a mad thing to do."
"Well, I've had time enough, haven't I, to think that out for myself?"
She became silent, her mind having gone back to a tragedy of which she was slow to speak, so that he wondered whether she were offended once more, and said: "Sorry. I won't interrupt again. What happened after that?"
"Everything went quietly at first. We saw no one for weeks, and the forest was strange, but kept on being the same, till I began to think that I shouldn't have been so dull on the Rio boat. . . . And after that I became afraid. It didn't happen at once. It was just gradual, and it wasn't that I guessed what was coming. Not in the least. I thought, as my uncle did, that we were too strong to have reason to be afraid, and when we'd been more than two months without seeing a living man, he said he'd made a fool of himself bringing all that he did. He said it was like dynamiting an open door.
"It wasn't that I was afraid of anything that the Indians were likely to do. It was just fear of the forest itself. The vast, dark, rain-beaten forest, and the monotony of the steaming heat. As the streams up which we came grew narrower, and the trees shut out the sky, it got worse, and I'd have given anything to go back, even alone. To feel that I should be getting nearer to Rio every time that the paddle struck, instead of always further, further away. But I was ashamed to say that, and it wouldn't have been any use if I had.
"Then there came a day - it can't have been many miles from here, though I can't say that I've seen it since - I suppose you know the forest well enough to understand that - when we got stuck. The canoes grounded, and we couldn't get forward or back.
"My uncle sent out two men to search for deeper water that we might be able to reach, and whether they just got lost, or fell into the Indians' hands, we never knew, but they didn't come back. After he'd waited two days, he sent out eight more - two parties of four, going opposite ways - and they didn't come back either, and that didn't do any good to the nerves of those who were left.
"You can see how we were placed. We didn't want to abandon the canoes. According to all that was known or believed about the forest levels, and according to the map we had, it was far too early to do that. My uncle had reckoned on using up much more of the stores, and getting on perhaps another five hundred miles, before he would have to abandon everything that the men couldn't load on their own backs."
"Yes," Devereux agreed, forgetting his promised silence, "I can sympathise there. I'm just in the same fix, if I can't find a way that the boat can go. That was what brought me looking round, and both of us into this mess."
"Well, that's how it was. If the forest had been dry, it would have been different. It would have seemed more likely that we'd got to leave the canoes behind, but it was under a foot of water in many places between the trees, and it didn't seem sense to leave the canoes, and begin wading through that.
"But, against that, the bush was so rank that we couldn't see any distance away. We'd made a camp that no one would leave for a dozen yards while the ten men that had gone to search didn't come back, and we couldn't stay there for ever.
"At last, my uncle said that the only way was to go ahead, yard by yard, in what seemed the clearest direction, dragging the canoes where the water was too shallow for them to float, and trying to find a place where there was space to get through without cutting down any of the larger trees.
"We went on like that for two days, and may have changed our position by eighty yards, and with no better prospect ahead. But the second afternoon we came to a channel of water where we could float the canoes, and we paddled on for about a mile before we came to an alley where it narrowed too much for us to get through, and there, at the side, there was a playa - a patch of red sand at the water side - and my uncle said we'd better land, and camp there for the night.
"I should say it wasn't ten minutes later that about half of us were dying or dead. There was grumbling as soon as the men landed that something was pricking their feet, and then one of them, who knew the Indian ways, called out - it was a scream of terror that I shall never forget - that they were walking on poisoned thorns. So it was, but it was a warning that came too late.
"My uncle wasn't hurt, neither was I, though I'd been out on the sand. We had shoes too good for the thorns to pierce. There was nothing that could be done for those who were pricked. They screamed and twisted about, and were soon dead. It was a horrible sight. Those of us who were unhurt got back into the canoes, and my uncle ordered the machine-gun to be fired into the bush.
"He kept that up for some time, but I don't know that it did any good. There was a queer cry once, that some said was a monkey's and some a man's, but nothing beyond that.
"The next morning we gave up the attempt to save The canoes. Those who were left - not much more than a dozen now - loaded as much as they could bear on their own backs, while keeping their hands free, and began to cut a way through the trees. My uncle wouldn't listen to any talk of turning back, and I don't think anyone much liked the idea. There might be something better ahead, or there might not, but we knew what was behind, and were in no mood to face it again. My uncle said that the fact that men didn't return that way didn't prove they hadn't found treasure, and better lands, for no one would go through that forest twice with nothing better than Manaos at the other end. . . . Anyway, that's what we did. We went on.
"But the blow-pipe darts began to come at us out of the trees. Not many at once. And they are so silent that they may fall unnoticed if they don't hit anyone. The Indians didn't show themselves, not more than a glimpse once or twice. I don't think they ever do. They don't want to get killed themselves. They want to kill those who come into their land.
"I don't know that it's sense to blame them for taking care of their own skins, but to go on, day by day, seeing no one, but feeling they're round you the whole time - it's enough to make you mad before the poisoned dart enters the skin.
"My uncle was one who didn't get hit, and he kept urging us on. He said that they might stop following us any time, if we got out of their own part of the forest - whatever that might be - and he had shots fired every now and then into the trees, which made us feel we were hitting back, if it did nothing more.
"After about a week of this, there were six of us left, and a whole day had passed without anyone getting hit, and we were beginning to hope again, and then we came to a little playa of sand, and it was the same where we had left the canoes, though they were gone, and the dead men had been taken away.
"We knew we hadn't been able to go very far, and that we hadn't always gone in a straight line, having to get through where we best could, and you know how little you can see of the sun, but we hadn't expected that, and even my uncle found it hard to keep up the show of courage which he had done until then. He began to curse the Indians as though it were they who had made us come round, as people are said always to do when they get thoroughly lost.
"I think we went quite blindly from there, only aiming to get away. We didn't run. You can't do that in the forest. But we did the nearest we could.
"That night, we didn't even venture to hang the, hammocks, though we had found that the Indians always left us alone when it was dark. We crouched in the densest bush, half dead with fear, and with the way we'd struggled on through the damp heat, loaded up as we were.
"When the morning came, we were one less. One of the men had died of exhaustion or fright, or something else that we didn't know. We had a hurried meal before it was fully light, trying to get away before the Indians would be awake - as though there were any use in that, with the trail we left, and they coming through the trees overhead at about ten times any pace that we were able to make, and while we were eating it my uncle looked at me, and said: "I don't think they've ever shot at you, have they?"
"I said I didn't know whether they had or not, but they'd missed if so, or I shouldn't be there, and he said: 'Well, we shan't let them get you alive; you needn't be afraid about that.' He made the other men promise to shoot me any time if he were killed, and seemed to think I ought to be rather pleased at the idea by the way he talked.
"I didn't say much, and I certainly didn't want to get into the Indians' hands, but I didn't look at it quite in the same way. It made me say what I'd thought more than once before, that we couldn't be worse off, and might be better, if we should break apart, and each try to escape separately. My uncle said if anyone felt like that he was free to go; but they didn't like the idea. So he divided the loads up again, which he had to do every time anyone was killed, so that we should leave behind the things we could best spare, and we set off again.
"We hadn't gone far before we could feel the Indians were round us on every side, and another man was shot almost at once. I think they may have decided to finish us off while we were close to their own lodge, but one of them got too bold, and showed himself, and was shot, and that seemed to frighten them off, for we were left alone for the rest of the day.
"I'd been thinking hard during that march, and when we camped I lay awake, tired as I was. I hadn't been able to get the idea of escaping separately out of my mind. My uncle had said that anyone could try it who wished, though I don't suppose he'd been thinking of me.
"I couldn't feel that I was deserting them, being no particular use that I could see, and I thought that if I were to slip away it must be done in the night, both to give me a chance of not being seen by the Indians and because my uncle mightn't have been willing to let me go. He'd seemed to think that shooting me was such a tempting idea that if I proposed going off alone he might have done it at once more likely than not; and I didn't feel quite the same about it, even in the mess I was in. I don't suppose most girls would."
She paused, as though to invite his confirmation on this point of female psychology. It was a proposition that raised some doubt in his mind. He could imagine women who would think solitude in the Amazon forests, with the possible company of its savage denizens, men and reptiles and beasts, to be worse than the quick death that a bullet gives, but he had Iearnt to be circumspect in his replies.
"I don't suppose," he said, "any girl would be keen on being shot by her own friends, especially if they thought they could choose the time without asking her to consent. But if you ventured into the forest alone, knowing what it would be like - well, I should say it was a very brave thing to do."
"Well, that's what I did. But I can't say that I felt very brave at the time. But I'd got the idea fixed in my mind that if we stayed together we should all be caught or killed in the end, even apart from the special privilege which was intended for me; but that if we broke apart in the night, one or two, if not more, might have a chance of escape, and I argued this, but it wasn't an idea that anyone else seemed to like. . . . I'd been carrying most of the things that I specially wanted, but I had to leave some that the others would need to have, and I had to crawl about in the dark without waking the others, to find some things that were vital to have - I mean my fair share, of course - and doing that (there was no moon that night) taught me that getting away in the dark wasn't such a feasible thing. I couldn't see for a foot, and I thought that I should be likely to make a noise breaking into the bush, or splashing about, and they'd wake and all shoot at the noise, and I should get just what I was trying to miss. And besides - not being able to see a step ahead - - "
"Yes. I can understand that. What did you do?"
"I waited till the light was just beginning to come, and then, as the others began to stir, I just slipped away. I knew that when I was gone a few yards I should be as much lost from them as though it were miles, and I reckoned I should still have time to get clear before the Indians were about."
She stopped, as though at the end of a finished tale and then added: "And now perhaps you'll tell me what you're supposed to be doing here."
CHAPTER X
THE TREE-CAVE
DEVEREUX felt that the narrative had been broken off with an abruptness that left much untold, but he recognized that it might have covered most, if not all, that she was inclined to tell, and that she had as natural a curiosity about himself as he had of her. He said: "I'm afraid my tale isn't much beside yours. I came on the same search, and it's rather curious that I was put on to the idea by the same man, but I came alone, and had no adventures at all till I got here, and the boat stuck."
"Yes. This seems to be where they begin - and generally end."
"But I don't see why they should. It must be that we turn into the wrong channel, and get stranded, which is how the trouble starts. But there must be a channel through. It isn't sense in this flat, flooded forest that there's no waterway deep enough to carry us on. Peixoto must have gone a different way, and got through. But there's nothing surprising in that, and, of course, after three hundred years the channels may not be the same."
"I don't think we need trouble about that now."
"You think they'll have found the boat?"
"No, I don't. They'd find it sooner or later, of course. But if you've left it reasonably hidden about fifty to one that they won't find it this afternoon. We both know what the forest is, and how cautious the Indians are. If we get to the boat while the moon's up - and it rises early and full tonight - we've got more than a chance that we get clear."
"I don't see how I'm to find a channel in the dark that I couldn't find in the day."
"But if you can't go forward, you can go back."
"It's not quite as simple as that, and I don't see that it would be much help if it were. I don't want go back."
"You don't mean that you still want to go on?"
The question was an exclamation in which incredulity fought with fear.
"I don't know," he answered stubbornly, "why you should think I've changed my mind in the last hour."
"But after what I've told you! And now that the Indians know! If you'd seen how they treat those that they catch alive!"
"I can imagine that. But I'm not caught, and you seem to have got away."
"But how far? And are you suggesting that we go on together to - well, heaven knows where? Can't you understand that I must get home? I suppose" - her voice of derision had a hint of nervousness, faint but still definite to perceive - "I suppose you're not going to propose shooting me too?"
"No. I'm not a Portuguese uncle. The idea hadn't occurred to me till you mention it now. But I don't want to turn back, and it isn't a fair thing to ask. Your uncle wouldn't turn back for you when he was only started a few days, or whatever it was."
She was silenced for a few seconds by this unexpected retort, but her desire was too desperate to be silenced by any argument, good or bad. She said: "That wasn't the same at all. You can see that! We thought everything would go well. And besides, I wanted to come. It's quite different now. And after all you know now it's a mad folly to try."
"I've never expected that it would be an easy thing to get through."
"Even getting back won't be that. It's not only myself. I'm thinking of you too. It would be just throwing your life away."
He made no answer, feeling that, whether he were to live or die, his enterprise had already failed. Cherchez la femme. He cursed fate in his heart, and all the mothers of men.
She had intuition to see that he would only be stirred to further irritation, and perhaps obstinacy, by any sentimental appeal, and she tried reason again, in what she felt to be a reasonable cause.
"It's no use quarrelling, is it? We've got to help each other, if we're to have any chance at all. Why, if I didn't help you now, I don't suppose you could find the boat in a hundred years! Not from where we are now."
He had a moment's fear, not only that she might be right, but that in the night, even with her aid, it might not be simple to do. Not knowing where he now was in relation to the boat, how could he explain it to her? But he remembered the care with which he had noted the position of the tree by which he had climbed, in relation to the loftier tree-tops that surrounded the Indian lodge.
"I don't agree," he said, "about that. Even if you would be mean enough to refuse. But I don't want to quarrel. I only say that it isn't reasonable to ask me to go back, now that I've come all this way."
She answered in better temper, seeing evidence of victory in the exasperation with which he spoke: "I'm not only asking it for myself. I think it's the only thing for you to do. And I should be glad to think we can manage that."
Without waiting for his further reply, she went on: "How did you mark the place where you left the boat?"
When he had told her that, she said: "That ought to be simple enough. But I should like a look round while the light's good, and I don't think I shall go wrong after that. There won't be much risk if I just go up and return."
The rain had ceased now, and the unseen sky above was clear to the setting sun. The feeble light that penetrated the tangled mass of tree and creeper and broad-leafed palm was somewhat increased to eyes that had become trained to the dark. She had been fumbling for the last minutes in the black rear of the hollow in which they crouched, and now that she came to the front he saw that she was clothed in the breeches which she had worn when she first escaped into the forest, and an upper garment which the half-light did not clearly define.
"I shall be back," she said, "in much less than an hour. If I'm not, you can reckon anything here is yours. I shan't want it again."
"I shouldn't go, if you feel it's as risky as that."
"Risky as what? That's only a way of talking. You'll see me again quite as soon as you want to, if not before."
She climbed out on to the vines, and disappeared into the green gloom of the leaves, and he was alone again, to consider this unexpected adventure, and to decide what he would do, so far as any decision remained to him.
She had judged rightly when she had thought that victory would be hers where their wills clashed, though he might be exasperated to open rudeness as he gave way. He knew this almost as clearly as she, and more clearly so since she had emerged in the clothes that made assertion of what she was. It had been, indeed, the subtlest argument she could use: the most potent appeal. He might refuse to go back at the call of a woman who lived in a state of nudity in the trees - but for a lady of Rio who was in danger from savage hands!
And if he should abandon his hopes, and return with her to the civilisation from which she came, would it be sure to end, even then? He knew that, if he should do that, the hope that he might d